Impeccable perseverance
The van Riel Gallery is undoubtedly an example of impeccable perseverance. It is also the history of a family. In 1924 Frans van Riel decided to open in Florida street a space dedicated to art and artists and for three generations his family has devoted to make his dream come true. For 80 years the van Riel Gallery has witnessed fundamental processes in Argentinean art. The exhibition presented at arteBA Sala10 shows the latest 50 years of the gallery, with a revival of the emblematic Sala V. This exhibition allows us to see the movements that emerged in the local artistic panorama through the works of artists like Butler, Batlle Planas, del Prete, Gambartes, Paparella, Hlito, Noé, Castagana, Kirin, Corujeira, Badii, Kemble.
arteBA Fundación joins this celebration and dedicates the 11th edition of arteBA Sala10 to the 80th anniversary of the van Riel Gallery.
arteBA Foundation
Tribute to the van Riel Gallery
This exhibition revisits the most significant landmarks in the history of the van Riel Gallery through the latest fifty years. These events, of which Room V was the most emblematic, were directed by Frans van Riel, known to all of us, who is a projection of the other legendary Frans van Riel, his father, founder of the gallery in 1924. The artworks selected do not form an integrated narrative reciprocally articulated, they rather show the symptoms that were manifested by the different changes, movements, trends and oscillations between continuities and ruptures in Argentinean art.
The germinal years
Frans van Riel, Sr. arrived in Argentina in 1910. The pageantry for the Centenary of the Independence was a pure explosion of optimism. European intellectuals could not but notice this like Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, for example, in Argentina y sus grandezas (Argentina and its greatness). In 1913 Frans van Riel set up his studio of artistic photography in Viamonte street, between Maipú St. and Florida St.; in 1918 he started the publication of the Augusta magazine together with Manuel Rojas Silveyra, a critic in La Prensa and five years later, he opened the most impressing art gallery of Buenos Aires, at number 659 Florida street. It was in a building designed by architects Gallardo and Cuomo where the history of the gallery started. In 1927 the Asociación Amigos del Arte (Art’s Friends Association) initiated its activities in this gallery; later followed “Ver y Estimar” (To see and to appreciate), the Institute of Modern Art, the first independent theatre and a series of cultural and artistic events.
Working in art and for art
In and for art. Art is the motive and the aim of an honored heritage. It is a simple statement which is ratified every time it is assumed, laying down your life for it, to never give in.
The natural modesty of Frans van Riel always left important places for the growth of great artists. Without making himself conspicuous (which was not at all convenient for him but multiplies his outstanding universe) he always moved forward in the right direction accompanying significant changes in Argentinean art. His campaign had several fronts; collective and individual exhibitions, cenacles, artistic publications are successively allotted his efforts for the promotion, spreading, circulation and selling of art. He gives the exact dimension of the role of an art dealer, a gallery owner, always with the artists, with the critics, with the collector, with the public and with the theoretical debate, always in a converging coordinate with art development. His constant dynamism, his way of being on top of events, wide awake to whatever happened, generated the trust that everyone in the art world placed on him and sustained him in time, even during the closure of the emblematic exhibition halls in Florida Street in 1979.
Very soon after that, he resumed his activities as always, as a constant, passionate art dealer. For this reason, we find him re-opening his gallery in its present premises, located at 1257 Talcahuano street, where he started a new adventure with the unconditional support of his wife, Kicsi. This was a time when an insistent obstinacy for gallerism “at your own risk”, as Elba Pérez would put it, was a purely quixotic venture, less mercantile than philanthropic, that was more likely to lead him to bankruptcy than to wealth. With van Riel happened what Giulio Carlo Argan had told about Ambroise Vollard, the patriarch of Parisian art dealers, “the market influences the critique more strongly than the critique influences the market”, situation that appears only when the art dealer’s eye notices an artist’s potential. We must add that nowadays his exhibition halls also house the meetings of the Art Critics Association.
A visionary’s work
How did this life devoted to art unfold? Some landmarks will give this question an answer.
In a retrospective show of Horacio Butler, in 1968, van Riel exhibited works that the artist had brought from France in 1933 and that had been exhibited the same year at the exhibition halls of Amigos del Arte (Art’s Friends); thus he definitely showed the influence of this “return to order” clearly expressed by the Parisian artists.
The beginnings of 1950s found him alert to the experiences of the concrete artists. It was then that he invites Alfredo Hlito to an individual show in Room V, coinciding with the creation, in 1952, of the “Grupo de Artistas Modernos de la Argentina” (Argentinean Modern Artists). By that time Hlito worked, in the terms of Nelly Perazzo, “about the `theme´ on wide monochromatic surfaces which give flight to the forms that open into space”.
The avant-garde of the 1950s appears in the work of Kenneth Kemble and the gestural print of his paintings. But this informalist tendency is not the only one that van Riel discovers as a possibility of an expression with strong local connotation and, at the same time, belonging to an innovative experimentation. The attention he pays to the work of Leónidas Gambartes –and through him, to the Grupo Litoral– between 1958 and 1968, evidences his interest in those artists who are drawn to the symbolic mythical imaginary with essentially American roots, as an alternative answer to the hegemony of the European paradigm. In this way, the gallery opens to a periphery which becomes its absolute center.
He was probably seduced by Juan Del Prete’s “superb sense of freedom to go into and come out of the different art `houses´ whenever and in whatever manner he wanted” as was so well noticed by Damián Bayón. Between 1951 and 1969 the gallery’s rooms were open to the internal discussions that Del Prete’s work expressed. It is no lesser fact that in the retrospective exhibition of 1969 there should be present those abstractions of the 1930s which had been exhibited in the same rooms of Amigos del Arte (Art’s Friends) in van Riel’s gallery of Florida street. The consignment of 45 abstract works of Del Prete as special guest artist to the Biennial of Venice confirmed that the gallerist had a keen eye for art. Aldo Paparella established authentic landmarks with his provocative sculptures, “useless monuments”, torn metals, or his “artifacts”, under the bright look of Julio Llinás, or that of Aldo Pellegrini. Van Riel housed those forms that play havoc with any complacent look because they are not a formal pastime (Llinás) but they involve us in the disturbing zones of the subconscious. Earlier already the gallery had housed surrealist poetics, particularly those represented by Juan Batlle Planas; the metaphoric power of his images allowed the public of Buenos Aires, from the year 1952, to have access to a tendency that, anchored in the “historical avant-gardes“ of the beginning of the 20th century, continued with heroic persistence until today.
In 1965 Frans van Riel published “Noé’s anti-aesthetics”. In his already famous “Prólogo a la reincidencia” (Prologue to recidivism) the artist said: “an art dealer who was not interested in becoming a publisher invited me to publish this book, only for the love of art”. In this gallery, Noé took the first steps of a fruitful development. It was the year 1960 and Noé wrote in the prologue to the exhibition “I throw the paint; immediately the painting act happens on the canvas; a world full of suggestions emerges and it acts on me as a spot on the wall would act on a child’s sensitiveness”. In these words was the seed of one of the most significant tendencies of our artistic context.
With the work of Libero Badii the gallery promoted the poetics of the ominous associated to a perspective of magical and ritualistic nature. At the same time, it adhered to a fruitful alliance between the visual arts and literature, as was expressed at the exhibitions “Antonio Porchia visto por Libero Badii” (Antonio Porchia as seen by Libero Badii) in 1965 and “Macedonio Fernández visto por Libero Badii” (Macedonio Fernández as seen by Libero Badii), in 1966, both constituting an interesting graphic work.
Nearer the present days, we notice that since Blas Castagna started working in abstraction in a constructivist strain --also starting since that moment his exploration of materials and supports, which was of an unusual significance-- our gallerist promoted his work systematically as one of his most significant artists. It is in this context that we must understand the exhibition organized this year as a tribute. With Corujeira, another of his artists, this important tradition of geometric constructivism present in Argentina and Uruguay is reaffirmed. Here, too, van Riel’s choice was proved to be right by the inclusion of his work in the exhibition “La escuela del Sur” (The Southern School), held at the Centro Reina Sofía of Madrid in 1991, anticipated by three exhibitions at his gallery of Talcahuano street.
Kirin’s calligraphic worlds, enigmatic wooden structures, micro and macrocosmic worlds which seem to us wavering between the medieval and the Renaissance have inundated van Riel’s rooms with a fascinating hermetism which is open to infinite possibilities of combination; there is always a world hidden in cipher in his works, in the same way as behind Frans van Riel’s apparent fragility lies – hidden – the strength of a great hero who always stood by the artists when they needed him.
So many as are the things still to be done in Argentinean art, so many times will Frans van Riel’s name come back to our minds. By the time we should set out to the task of systematizing the functioning of local gallerism, the gallery which is now the object of our tribute will be in the memory of many. If, to put it in Cesare Pavese’s terms, Circe was right when she said to Ulysses that the only immortality granted to men was fame, we dare say that Frans van Riel, like the Homeric hero, is immortal among us because his heroic deeds in favor of art are already a long lasting memory in our history.
Malena Babino
Líbero Badii
Juan Batlle Planas
Horacio Butler
Blas Castagna
Alejandro Corujeira
Juan Del Prete
Leónidas Gambartes
Alfredo Hlito
Kenneth Kemble
Kirin
Luis Felipe Noé
Aldo Paparella