GROTESQUE AND PARODY

With the intention of showing a particular aspect of Argentinean art and highlighting its survival and continuity, this exhibition on grotesque and parodic figurations is an opportunity to make a tour of these categories and identifiable procedures in different works.

Evidently, the works don’t pretend to serve a critical function, but rather they limit themselves to offering a vision of reality, a vision which is essentially ironic, and more than ironic sarcastic, but which does not hide the seductive elements which inspired the artist to deal with it in the first place. It is only through this vision that its profound signification opens itself before us and acquires its true dimension. The outlines and the forms become more incisive, more cruel, elegance gives way to passion and lyricism suffers the presence of irony, which acts upon the colour and the organisation of the plastic space.

Exclusion and marginality, chaos and monstrosity, degradation and comicalness, the game of looking inverts itself, turning the public intimate and alternating the private and the public.

Comission arteBAsala10
Jacobo Fiterman
Juan Cambiaso
Alejandro Corres
Facundo Gómez Minujín


The Grotesque and Parody in Argentinean Art
Various tendencies can be traced in the Argentinean art of the 20th century. One of them is the critical tradition, as named by Damián Bayon, which relates especially to a series of works characterised by a sarcastic, grotesque, parodic and ironic tone. In a way, the types of humour come together in some prime examples with a certain underlying continuity. In the figuration of Argentinean art during the period between the 1960s and 1990s, a satirical and grotesque attitude is established in different degrees, at times explicit, other times barely outlined, as much of the political as of social events. In this way the parody of the artistic tradition, of classical texts, of deeply rooted values, has its place. A gibe which extends to the artistic system itself, which suspends judgments but provokes an ambivalent effect that remains as a basis, joy, horror, contrast.

During history, the grotesque mode was understood through different ways of classifying. In keeping with Bajtin’s studies, one can talk of a realist grotesque and a modernist grotesque (where sarcasm and the sinister mix and combine with the absurd). The grotesque places the emphasis on different ways of enunciating and explaining the themes: cruelty, violence, exaggeration, the inversion of every being, ignorance of one’s self. Hyperbole is its defining operation, the body is its stage, the mask its disguise. We can perceive the motives and operations of the grotesque as a diversion from a realist referential tendency, breaking away from the supposed logics of the similar, of the social possibilities, shattering the dominant aesthetic and ethical values of society. From there arises its immediate connection with the rude or the ridiculous. From the beginnings of the first expressions considered as grotesque, an opposition to the order of the beautiful emerged. This aesthetic concept was understood to be the aspects of the classical model which have survived throughout history.

For its part, the satirical, like the grotesque, participates in a mythical attempt and a realist attempt to see the world, it involves giving form to the changing ambiguities of society, crystallised in figures or motifs within realist conventions. Satire functions as much in the intellectual order as in the emotional one, thus it needs a target for attack. Unmasking is its activity, its denunciation responds, in the present to the critical dimension of the modern.

Parody is located in the field of imitation or transformation, which is at various instances analogue to the history of the grotesque. Etymologically it is “to sing at another pitch”, a parallel song which deforms or transposes a melody. It assumes that there is a text, a character or role, a situation which will be degraded. Such degradation may be adjusted to be comical or to be satire; parody achieves this degradation by dividing out the traits of a person, a character or a situation. In this process we find a similarity to the processes of the grotesque.

The Argentinean artists of the critical tradition show various ways of interpreting the previously mentioned techniques. The painters brought together under neofiguration have established an aesthetic synthesis between the paths apparently opposed to figuration and to abstraction, with the purpose of studying, with limitless expressive mediums, human existence; this is understood by the artists as the translation of the fragmented man and the elaboration of rules of chaos, in monstrous, grotesque and satirical components, with the addition of an imagery originating in the comic.
Between the 1960s and 1970s, Berni worked on a critique of pop culture, presenting grotesques and satires in painting, as well as in engraving since Juanito Laguna, and especially with the world of Ramona. In works such as El Torero, the evoking of the grotesque masquerade of expressionism or the skulls of the popular tradition, in the “Guadalupe Posada” way, make themselves present.

Alberto Heredia investigates the crudeness of media in order to show this human condition. The silencings form an objectual whole that is fully expressive of the repression and torture to which Argentinean society was subjected in the 1970s. Censure and violence. Grotesque of to the sinister tradition.

From a postfiguration perspective, Norberto Gómez investigated, in these years, a differentiated representation, with an original technique, whose result is sculpture in polyester resin. The forms, which make reference to the human and the animal from the rest, whether it be fossil or organic, metamorphosed, synthesise the monstrous grotesque and function once more as a metaphor for the torture of a body being sacrificed.

From the 1980s, Benedit presented a series of transformations resulting from his reading of gauchesque, scientific and expeditionary works, such as the series on Molina Campos. His productive machine is based in parody, as an operation of transformation-imitation of a source text. A homage to humour, in the picaresque.

Pablo Suárez makes his the concept of critical tradition and through his painting and objects elaborates a genealogy of the grotesque and parody in Argentina. The reflection focuses on the institution of art, as well as on the condition of the human in the face of life, death, the sacred, the banal. The situations lived by his characters are tragicomical, and thus grotesque, and the appearances correspond to this condition.

The engravings of Benavídez Bedoya show an iconography which invests in grotesque and satiric elements resulting from his surrealist inquiries, basically from the construction of what he refers to as his delirious theories. The expressive preoccupations of the medium blend together with the intimate body, sacred iconographies in scatological situations, sex and power are recurring themes.

In Eckell’s satirical painting, images outline a satire which in general places itself in power relations, in moments of pain and the arbitrariness of governments. In works from the 1980s, figures and situations refer to conditions of power, excess, laughter or scathing gestures, irony and a satirised milieu.

Marcia Schvartz becomes a painter of the realist grotesque. Her subject matter in the 1980s traverses urban popular mythology, neighbours, everyday life. The characters and the settings are grotesque in the way of scenes of conjugal life, the intimate or intranscendental takes the place of representation.

It is possible to say that the visual arts in Argentina focus their subject matter on the grotesque and parodic processes calling upon a great encyclopedia of history, both noble and vulgar, with evidently codified motifs, types and figures. Bodies which aren’t docile become monstrous, use disguises, in metamorphosis, in which humour and horror converse.

Curators: María de los Ángeles de Rueda and María de las Mercedes Reitano
Research: María de los Ángeles de Rueda