In this exhibition Henrique Faria Fine Art presents an important selection of the 1960’s and 1970’s works of Alejandro Puente (La Plata, 1933), one of Argentina’s and Latin America’s seminal conceptual artists.
From the beginning of his career, Alejandro Puente developed an abstract body of work based principally on his interest in color. Studying the work of Albers, and working with processes and systems in a similar creative path as that of Sol Lewitt and other minimalist and conceptualist artists of the period, Alejandro Puente’s works were not so much dealing with color as a formal expressive element but as a codification of a system of meaning. As such, colors work as prototypes: unanimously accepted denominations like the chromatic scale that establishes a system of conventional relations; that is to say a type of language. As such, his Sistemas Cromáticos (Chromatic Systems) are composed of clean, flat, pure lines of color, minimizing the pictorial brush to the point of its virtual disappearance.
The next stage in his creative process, strongly strengthen by his time spent in New York between 1967 and 1971, was the development of his series Elementos Modulares (Modular Elements), an example of which is the 1967 work Cubo (Cube). In these works, the artist abandons the physical wall space and invites the viewer to insert himself into three-dimensional modular structures in which color and structure are both perceived in a spatial and sensorial way. Puente says about these works: What is important about it is the idea: others can take care of the execution. Once established a combination, I could as well give the problem for a computer to determinate the amount of possible relations”
A distinctive point of the works and the theory developed by Puente is that his series of chromatic systems does not seek to remove itself from referential or ideological information, a feature prevalent in movements from that period. On the contrary, for Puente there is an important reference to historical work that uses colors and the way they were combined, such as their intertwining in the pre-Columbian drawings and fabrics. The artist clearly understood that these works, natural to indigenous American peoples, flourished well before they were taken up by the 20th century vanguards.
From the early 60’s, Puente participated in the Buenos Aires avant-garde scene centered mainly around the Instituto Di Tella. This institution was directed by Jorge Romero Brest and in 1967 organized the important exhibition “Mas allá de la geometría” (Beyond Geometry), in which Puente participated. That same year, the artist won the Guggenheim fellowship with a recommendation letter by Sam Hunter and Clement Greenberg, who had traveled to Buenos Aires following an increase of cultural interchange between New York of artists, curators and exhibitions. In 1968, a North American version of “Beyond Geometry” was organized at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York.
During his stay in NYC, which lasted until 1971, Puente continued his friendship with Sol LeWitt, whom he had met in Buenos Aires, and developed a strong professional relationship with Lucy Lippard, whom he would later recommend as a juror for an award in Buenos Aires. In 1970, Puente participated in an exhibition “Information”, at The Museum of Modern Art that would champion the conceptualist movement in the United States, and in which many Argentines participated together with Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Walter de Maria, Helio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jeff Wall and Lawrence Weiner. Alejandro Puente lived and worked in Buenos Aires until his death in 2013.
“The word system, like any other technical word taken from colloquial speech, has many meanings; it is therefore imprecise. Though this lack of precision in a technical word might initially seem dangerous, it is, in fact, often useful because it allows ideas to flourish while they are still vague; it allows connections to be made between ideas yet to be explored; and it allows those ideas to be extended and broadened instead of circumscribed and confined by a premature definition and precision. Of the many definitions of the word system, we are interested in two: the idea of “system as totality” and the idea of “generating system”. Though on the surface they may seem similar, these two notions are really quite different. In the first case, the word system makes reference to a holistic consideration of a given thing. In the second, the word system makes no reference whatsoever to things, but rather to the interplay of parts and rules of combination capable of generating many things. (…)Generating systems needn’t be conscious or explicit; in reality, the system becomes part of the resulting object. The artist becomes a ‘designer of systems that make objects’ instead of a ‘designer of objects’ ”.
Alejandro Puente, New York, 1968. Reproduced in Rafael Cippolini (ed.), Manifiestos argentinos. Políticas de lo visual 1900-2000, Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo, 2003 and in Alonso, Rodrigo and others, Imán: Nueva York, Buenos Aires, Fundación Proa, 2011 (exhibition catalogue)
[1] Alejandro Puente in Yurkievich, Saúl. Revista Nacional de Cultura, May, June Number 193. Caracas, 1970
[2] Refer to Alonso, Rodrigo and others, Imán: Nueva York, Buenos Aires, Fundación Proa, 2011 (exhibition catalogue) and Andrea Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política (Arte argentino en los años sesenta), Paidós, Buenos Aires, 2001