Alberto Delmonte

By Héctor Cartier

Teacher and art critic. He has taught at the Advanced School of Fine Arts of the National University of La Plata, and at the “Manuel Belgrano”, “Ernesto de la Cárcova” and “Prilidiano Pueyrredon” Fine Arts Schools in Buenos Aires. He is a member of the National and International Associations of Art Critics. August, 1981.

Alberto Delmonte knows that every work, every artistic expression, requires the intrinsic “reason” of its vital necessity, as a structured body. For this same reason, the formative orchestration produces such expressive intensity in itself that it exceeds and reveals all reference to the subject as such. Being art, its value cannot be found in any reference “book”, but in the sensitive creation of that outward appearance transposed with creative plasticity. This plasticity bears witness to an inner world rich in deeply felt resonance, later reborn to the world of “light” as an innovative manifestation.

As long as we are referring to the creator's world with that little “extra” known as artistic quality, this is so and will continue to be so. It is what, with such understanding and commitment and without excessive rhetoric, Delmonte's penetrating and visible aesthetic vision conveys to us.

From Cézanne to cubism, painting clings to a singular autonomy. With any aesthetic idea, this autonomy depicts the huge importance acquired by the inevitably structured means employed for expressive purposes, in the configuration of a whole or a form. And this wholeness is what can, and must, give meaning both to the most recognizable and to purely abstract expression. On the other hand, every work -of a highly creative level and conceived from and for the sensitive and the intellectual- together with the contributions of the imaginary world, entails a considerable degree of abstraction. This qualitative condition is, precisely, what enhances and defines Delmonte's creations.

Due to his solvency and capacity to communicate - communication authentically conceived both through meditation and sensitivity, he manages to draw our attention to prototypical images whose operational validity attracts, moves and captivates. And he does so in the possession and handling of unique dimensions of pictorial space, where the referential objective elements open, sever, distend and overlap, creating a very personal conception of sensitively dynamic and evocative space (where the internal logic of the framework-plane is a formal factor). In this way it directs us and moves us toward an encounter with that “wholeness”, contemplating the place where the poetic dwells, deep within our being and stripped of resources beyond the act of creation itself.

Translation: Edward Shaw