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Alicia Haber:    Mercosur Biennial ( II )
Thus, the visitor had the occasion to learn about and recognize diverse expressions of constructivism and different possibilities within geometric abstractionism, to engage in dialogue with the works of the great artist being honored, the Argentine Xul Solar, to partake in another small homage to the Venezuelan Jesús Soto (to whom a private space was also dedicated), to observe tendencies of political content expressed in very dissimilar media and languages over the last four decades (above all from the conflictive years of the seventies onward) to pay attention to the cartographic theme from that landmark, the inverted map and the motto »Nuestro Norte es Nuestro Sur« (»Our Compass Points South«) by the Uruguayan master Joaquín Torres García all the way up to our own day, and to discover various movements in contemporary art being made in a number of countries on the continent.

The emphasis was more historical than is typical for a biennial, revealing the need to underscore the relevance of certain contributions by art from this continent and to mark its presence in the context of Western creativity of the Twentieth Century. The last five years, exhibited in the DC Navegantes locale, the Object-based Imagination in abandoned warehouses in the port, in the Marinha do Brasil Park, in the Public Market, and in the DEPRC, and the Interventions in the city of Porto Alegre did not manage to counterbalance the marked historical emphasis of the show.

Taking into account the poverty of the collections of museums of the Southern Cone of Latin America and their limitations, this was a good way of coming to know once again, in no uncertain terms, the fine art of Latin America. In the majority of our countries, museums don't have large enough collections to represent art histories, above all, those of the last forty years; a large part of contemporary artistic patrimonies remains in the artists' workshops. For these reasons, these historical reviews are more than welcomed. For many visitors from Europe and the United States it was also an occasion for discovery. And that fact alone justifies the historical character of several of the exhibits.

Jesús Soto
Jesús Soto
The selection was fairly well-tuned and on a few occasions spaces were created of surprising quality, as much because of the works themselves as the quality and sophistication of the display, such as occurred in the very museum-like ULBRA in which the constructivist tendencies were exhibited and in the Biennial Foundation Space in which the political art tendencies were shown. In general, the Biennial presented a very encouraging panoramic view of Latin American creativity and possessed the virtue of being directed with a continent-wide perspective by curators from the invited countries and not through the hegemonic gaze of the North.

The first Mercosur Biennial is an unprecedented feat for a marginal city in the periphery that, until this historic moment, had never been an artistic center. It is a huge step for the »gaucho« city of Porto Alegre, one deserving of applause and which speaks to the powerful Brazilian reality in socioeconomic context in that country that has serious problems, a very unequal distribution of wealth, major sectors of poverty.

Above all, what stood out was the paradox of Porto Alegre having been turned into a sort of artistic capital of Mercosur in the face of more privileged locations such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo, much prettier from an urban point of view, with enormous cultural and artistic traditions, fewer socioeconomic conflicts, the greater weight of an educated middle class and with better exhibition spaces (above all in the Argentine capital). Porto Alegre more than overcame its disadvantages and dethroned Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Superbly.

An Homage to the Great Xul Solar

Lygia Clark
Lygia Clark
The homage to Xul Solar (1887-1963) was well deserved. The various works exhibited in the APLUB served to confirm his creative faculties. An intense, lyrical, transparent, and warm chromatics, a play of dynamic forms moving through space, and a constant geometricization are characteristics of a production that has an undeniable incantatory power.

An imaginative figuration imposes itself on everything, designing an iconography with an oneiric, surrealist, and metaphysical spirit. In that cryptic world emerge enigmatic labyrinths, mysterious castles, exotic mountains, strange human figures, fabulous homunculi, eye-catching larval forms, fantastic architecture, and marionettes onto all of which he adds abstract drawings, letters, numbers, words, horoscopes, the Star of David, the cross, mandalas, suns, moons, and snakes that form a complex symbolic world. Face-beings with multiple visages and eyes become »plurentes«, utopian architectures open up like folding screens surrounding gardens and statues, small characters climb the stairs toward the cavities of ruins, phantasmagorical, anthropomorphic poles acquire the characteristics of organic beings, a strange plane-boat-house flies over a port town, saints and guardians meditate on top of unstable totem poles that break but don't fall and signs and masks emerge as sculptures in landscapes. A sustained belief in reincarnation, a cosmic sensibility, mysticism, and constant philosophical speculation define the enigmatic region of these paintings.

The Guggenheim of the Pampas

Xul Solar
Xul Solar
This was the ingenious nickname with which the »gauchos« from the state of Rio Grande dubbed the astounding space of the Mesbla stores, now reclaimed through an excellent act of recycling as temporary exhibit space for the Mercosur Biennial and presented as the ULBRA Space. The characterization arose not only from the similarity of the curvilinear forms of the great balconies and the rooms that were opened starting with this section but from the museum-like quality of the exhibited pieces and the modern emphasis of the whole complex, one of the most notable aspects of the Mercosur Biennial. Grouped together were outstanding examples of constructive universalism and of the Southern School of Torres García, of Madi art from the River Plate Basin, Venezuelan kinetism, Brazilian concretism, and various constructive schools from the history of Latin American art expressed in painting, design, objects, and sculptures.

Although he was represented by only one sculpture, the Uruguayan Gonzalo Fonseca stood out in the area of constructive universalism due to the enigmatic qualities and the great symbolic potential radiated by the dwellings of his piece. In a singular fashion Fonseca captures allusions to eternity, the impossibility of absolute knowledge, the difficult access to knowledge, nostalgia, remembrance, and communion with the cosmic that materialize in his forms. The artist demonstrates his love for archeological richness and his fascination for the cultural, the esoteric, and the mysterious. He has a unique way of handling volumes with cavities, esplanades, or spaces within which he situates geometric structures and the idea emerges of a container, box, reliquary, sacrarium, or place dedicated to a primitive cult.

Madi art was a high point of the show as well and produced a nucleus of numerous top-quality pieces from this movement born in August of 1946 at the French Institute of Superior Studies in a now-famous exhibition. There were a number of examples of paintings, sculptures, and objects with their points and lines on one surface, the irregular frame, and the rupture with the orthogonal frame (pioneered by the Uruguayan Rhod Rothfuss in 1944), an emphasis on planism in the painting, and a development of articulated, rotational, and changing movement in the sculpture.

The show provided the opportunity for a journey of re-encounters toward a moment of glory in abstract art from the River Plate Basin with examples of other schools linked to the Madi movement, such as perceptivism and spatialism. Prominent among these were the works of the Uruguayan Carmelo Arden Quin and of the Argentines, Gyula Kósice and Raúl Lozza, and standing out above them all were the sculptures of the Argentine Ennio Iommi and the works of the Italian-Argentine Lucio Fontana.

Espaço Ulbra
Ulbra Space
Rooms spotlighting Carlos Cruz-Diez from Venezuela, the Brazilians Lygia Clark and Hélio Oticia, the Venezuelans Alejandro Otero and Jesús Soto (who also received a well-deserved, small yet successful special homage in the San Pedro Theater), the Brazilian Sérgio Camargo, the impressive presentation of the enormous sculptures by the Brazilians Ascanio and Franz Weissman, and works by the Brazilian Amilcar de Castro were a few of the many possible outstanding options in this broad tour of constructive, geometric, and kinetic abstraction in which Venezuela and Brazil certainly claimed a noteworthy place. In nearly all cases there were major works provided an authentic overview of these creators. There was even a very interesting spatial installation by Cruz-Diez.
Hélio Oiticia
Hélio Oiticia

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