CÉSAR PATERNOSTO

Our current exhibition is particularly interesting in that it is the first solo showing in Spain of the Argentinian artist César Paternosto. Considered to be one of the most outstanding personalities in contemporary Latin American culture, his career fuses his facets both as an artist and an intellectual. The exhibition, composed of 28 paintings and 15 drawings, is intended as a journey through his mature work. The project, conceived and curated by Tomàs Llorens, Director of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, is organized as a selection of works in the form of a poem whose first three lines correspond to the titles of the three sections into which the exhibition is divided.

NUMBERS GERMINAL LIGHTS
Works belonging to the category the artist has termed “the oblique vision”.

EXPANDED CRISTALINE FIRES
Intensely chromatic paintings recalling the “color field” works of American Abstract Expressionism, although with an unusual cultural component.

WATER STRANDS
Referring to the works of a subtle, tremulous geometry, as suggested by Cecilia Vicuña.
From the very outset of his career César Paternosto was an abstract artist, working first in the expressionist mode and shortly afterwards as a geometricist, within the great tradition of the Latin American vanguard, as best exemplified by Joaquín Torres García and the Madí movement. Within this context, his work evolved in the line of Concrete Art towards what might be called a “sensitive geometry”. Through his use of delicate tones and subtly irregular lines, the artist attenuated the characteristic coldness of geometric tendencies. In 1969 he discovered the expressive possibilities of the edge of the canvas, enabling him to transform the painting into an object which, in turn, obliged the spectator to modify his or her traditional position towards the work. In 1977, however, his intuitive exploration of forms took a fundamental turn when he discovered the semantics of the geometric decorations utilized by the pre-Columbian cultures. From that time on, both his work in the plastic arts and his theoretical research as well, have consistently attempted to make visible the relations between modern art and the ancestral geometric art of the American continent. His work—geometric, but sensitive, colorist and luminous; abstract, but always linked to material reality—seems to be a perfect counterpoint to the work of Esteban Vicente, himself, a Latin in New York, like Paternosto, and also an abstract painter attuned to the sensual dimension of art.

César Paternosto was born in La Plata, Argentina in 1931. Early on he attended drawing and painting classes while finishing his law degree. After practicing law for a short time, he devoted himself completely to painting. In 1961 he moved to New York. His work has won him fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim, Gottlieb, Rockefeller and Pollock-Krasner foundations. He has exhibited in such prestigious galleries as the Denise René, Carmen Waugh, Ruth Benzacar, Cecilia de Torres and Jorge Mara galleries. His paintings can be found in the most important museums in North and South America: the MoMa, Guggenheim, Hirschorn, Sofía Imbert of Caracas and the Museo Nacional of Buenos Aires, and in Spain in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Critics such as Alfred Barr, Lucy Lippard, Damián Bayón, Ricardo Martín Crosa and Aldo Pellegrini have written about his work. In addition to his work as an artist, he has also published his research into the abstract symbolic systems of the ancient civilizations of America in a book entitled Piedra Abstracta (1989), translated into English in 1996. Moreover, he has also curated several exhibitions, such as the one entitled Abstracción: el paradigma amerindio, held at the IVAM in 2001