A SHIFTING OF THE GAZE
In the mid 1960s, Alejandro Puente delved deeper into the structural relations of his work. In Pintura, from 1965, he not only experimented with the organization of shapes and colors on the surface, but extended the color to the edges of the canvas and, having displaced the focal point, he forced the spectator to shift his gaze toward the sides. This first break with pictorial tradition–used to center the field of vision on the front of the canvas–placed his work midway between a painting and an object. He was soon encouraged to take the canvas down from the wall to work with modular systems that, having invaded the space, triggered the audience’s action to circle the piece in order to observe all its views and reconfigure the whole. With these proposals, he no doubt radicalized the break with the two-dimensionality of the painting-screen.
Puente had accessed the concept of structure encouraged by his teacher Héctor Cartier, who had also directed him to the reading of Robert Gillam Scott’s Design Fundamentals, where he discovered different ways of thinking about the articulation of shapes and colors. From then on, the notion of the system became central to his reflections and guided his plastic production. Beyond the idea of the system as totality, he understood this notion as a generator of the rules that ensured the interaction between the parts of a work.
At the end of the 1960s he put into practice this concept to regulate the set of rules of the different combinations that intervened in his works, be they the primary structures, the systems made up of “L” modules, the painted chromatic series, the arrangement of people he photographed for the piece shown in the Groups exhibition–organized in 1969 by Lucy Lippard at the School of Visual Arts Gallery–or the color sequences of Todo vale, a conceptual piece that he showed in 1970 at the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
When he outlined each system, Puente plotted the shapes and color relationships with their corresponding spatial floor organization on a graph over sheets of information. At the beginning of the 1970s–when he still lived in New York–among the schematic approaches revealed in these sheets he began to notice a certain resemblance with the geometrical shapes used by pre-Hispanic traditions. It is possible that the cultural differences he noticed accelerated the process of rethinking his poetics, but the fact is that from that moment on he gradually began turning toward an imaginary with American roots, which provided a set of formal elements and other conceptual components that permanently changed the direction of his work.
When he returned to Argentina, the key pattern that Andean cultures applied to the warp and weft of their textiles prevailed in his compositions. The repetition of the module also entered his paintings and fabric and thread layouts. That homogenous grid also allowed him to further the variations of color by way of gradations and highlights in a series of works in which light took on importance when it generated vibrational effects.
Puente experimented with non-traditional materials: he assembled pieces of wood and carved incisions in them, he created collages with feathers, he took advantage of the textures of particleboard and cork, and even worked with threads knotted in the manner of the quipus used by the Incas to count on the basis of strings codified by color and number of knots. He became interested in pre-Hispanic architecture beginning with the reproduction of facades, the stepped structures or floor designs, traits that added character to his large-format compositions, which he often titled with Mapuche, Inca or Mayan names. Later, his proposals for archaic architectures also combined views and broadened his gaze toward interior spaces.
The collection of works that is being exhibited demonstrates that the systems as well as the American impression present throughout his work were always interpreted by means of an abstract language for which the rationality of the constructivist model was not incompatible with the sensible qualities of the expression, because his had always been a humanized geometry that aimed to overcome the rigidity of the neo-plasticist approach, and to recover the marks of identity without succumbing to folkloric interpretation. A member of the postwar wave of artists who were determined to delve into the latent possibilities of the avant-garde, Alejandro Puente maintained an interest in shifting the gaze and was an active protagonist of the neo-avant-garde that reactivated the postulates of constructivism.
Cristina Rossi holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Theory. Researcher and Professor of Latin American Art and at the UBA and UNTREF. She is an independent curator and a member of the CAIA and the AACA-AICA.
Alejandro Puente (La Plata, 1933–Buenos Aires, 2013) began his art studies under Héctor Cartier at the Facultad de Arte de La Plata, focusing on sight and color theory. He then joined the Grupo Sí, whose first expositions took place in 1961 in the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes de La Plata and later in the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. In 1967 he received a Guggenheim Grant, with which he traveled to New York and resided there for four years. Before he left, he was part of the exposition Más allá de la geometría at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella and in its North American version, Beyond Geometry, at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York (1968). In 1970 he was invited to participate in Information at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From there, he went on to exhibit in Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Cuba, Japan, and China. In 1985 he was chosen to represent Argentina in the 18th Bienal de São Paulo. He has gained many recognitions, including: First Prize at Salón Telecom Argentina (1995), First Prize at Salón Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (1999), Grand Prize at Salón Nacional de Pintura (2001), Konex Award (2002), Gold Harlequin Prize, Fundación Pettoruti (2002) and the Rosario Prize, Fundación Castagnino (2003). Puente’s work has been acquired by numerous public and private collections, both in Argentina and abroad.