Argentina in Madrid. Ultramar: Fontana, Kuitca, Seeber, Tessi

With the title Ultramar: Fontana, Kuitca, Seeber, Tessi, the Museum and the Argentinean Ministry of Culture are presenting a selection of six paintings by 20th - and 21st - century Argentinean  artists – Lucio  Fontana, Guillermo  Kuitca, Alejandra Seeber and Juan Tessi – which establish a dialogue with the most contemporary works in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection.

The works to be seen in this installation share a restrained use of colour, an interest in pigment as a field of exploration and an approach to the spatial dimension which involves the use of radical gestures such as cuts and holes or the inclusion of external elements that extend beyond the limits of the image.

The work of Lucio Fontana (Rosario de Santa Fé, Argentina, 1899 – Varese, 1968) reveals  an artist who admired and was interested in spatial discoveries, technical advances and scientific progress, aiming to incorporate them into his own work. Fontana’s aim of avoiding prevailing artistic conventions and of using paint and sound as elements to regenerate art led him to publish his White Manifesto in 1946. After moving to Italy, in 1947 he wrote the Primo manifesto dello spazialismo, followed by the Secondo manifesto the year after. The cuts and holes (tagli and bucchi) in his canvases appeared shortly afterwards, in 1949, as a response to the issue of how to overcome the plane in painting and take it towards space. Venice was all gold (1961) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection is a monochrome work with a cut that tears the canvas in half in reference to the absence of limits in the pictorial plane.  

The interest revealed by Guillermo Kuitca (Buenos Aires, 1961) in investigating the pictorial process through the representation of space is already evident in his earliest series of 1982. Outsize theatrical settings give way to partial views of the stalls, all located mid-way between figuration and abstraction. After painting the constellations on the bumps in a mattress, in Double Eclipse (2013) Kuitca turned to the astonishing and rare phenomenon of the alignment of the planets, locating the earth, the moon and the sun in a vast space against the deepest and darkest blue that an eclipse can produce.

Some of the series by Alejandra  Seeber (Buenos Aires, 1969) are the result of self-imposed restrictions. On occasions Seeber paints according to the instructions on randomly selected pieces of paper with indications that she herself has written. On other occasions these limitations relate to the time allowed for producing the work (within a pre-determined period) or the colour range (the work must be produced in certain colours). Taxi! (2015) is an inventory of fragmented and recomposed forms including a brick wall and an arm that raises itself in order to hail a taxi. “I’m tired of hearing that painting is decorative”, Seeber has said, “before anyone else does, I’d rather destroy it myself.” 

In Coreo (Triptych) of 2015 Juan Tessi (Lima, 1972) lightly defines human figures to which he adds ceramic extensions that are attached to the upper edge of each of the three works in the triptych. These clay heads add a sculptural dimension to the work. Rather than using oil paint, Tessi superimposes layers of different textures and transparencies on the stretcher, producing the background colour through a process of accumulation. Tessi is interested in paint’s capacity to function as both surface and object simultaneously and in expressing non-pictorial issues in the process such as bodily impulses and the urges of desire. He thus constructs his works in the manner of an organic process, like the layers of the epidermis.