Alberto Delmonte

By Rosa Faccaro

Art Critic. Secretary General of the Argentine and International Association of Art Critics. November, 1991.

The path that leads us to becoming what we are, and that supplies the essence of our identity, is no more than a way of life that incites us to see, with contingencies, our own sign, that enriches our story.

Alberto Delmonte's artistic history goes back to his great-grandfather, Bernardo Troncoso, a 19th century draftsman and painter, co-partner in a group known as “La Colmena” (The Beehive), which is mentioned by Ramon Columba, writer and humorist, in “El Congreso que yo he visto” (The Congress that I have seen). Surrounded in his childhood by his great-grandfather's photographs and drawings, he was able to decipher the feelings contained in the images that would mark the way for his subsequent itinerary in search of the painter's constructive secret.

While on this journey Alberto Delmonte found the beings that would enrich and clarify his aesthetic convictions. The task was slow, like the development of the sketch and project for a building that not only responds to its beauty and function, but also to the structure that provides it with its body, and to the foundations that will keep it securely vertical.

In Montevideo, Uruguay, on a trip with Alfredo Palacios, he came into contact with the works and expressions of artist Joaquín Torres García. Later on, he would supplement the fundamental propositions set down by this master by reading “El Constructivismo” (Constructivism).

His students, Edgardo and Alceu Ribeiro, Carlos Llanos and Guillermo Fernández among them, would provide Delmonte with an approach to the pedagogic methodology to which he would eventually devote himself, at the workshop he opened in 1971 in Buenos Aires, a workshop which students of Torre’s followers would attend.

It is worth recalling that Marcos Tiglio, Carlos de la Cárcova, Héctor Cartier, Julio Payró and Guillermo Magrassi, were the ones who, together with travel and reading, would round out Delmonte's understanding and style of expression.

A special understanding of American cultures, and the tradition of the pictorial schools of the River Plate, formed part of the search for his pictorial language. He would select and adjust his style, by contrast and disqualification, in order to abandon all that did not harmonize with his feelings.

The path was forged slowly, with a persistent determination to extract an internal and contextual truth that would be the verification of a profound thought, and the global understanding of a scripture that would refer to the idea of wholeness.

The trip he took to Europe in 1975 would confirm his interest in pre-Columbian cultures, underlining his sense of belonging and his roots in American culture.

He waited eighteen years to exhibit his paintings, but, from 1967 on, he presented thirty five one-man exhibitions.

A conquest that forms part of his own domain is an awareness of the linguistic process and an investigation into the constant opportunities surrounding an artistic itinerary, which he was to develop from figuration to abstraction.

One of the objectives Alberto Delmonte achieved was the creation of a constructive system that refers to an “American reality”.

In the work of his early period, his close relationship with his teacher, Marcos Tiglio, can be seen in his use of impasto and the transfiguration of objects within the chromatic brilliance of light. But the peculiar characteristic of that period is the constructive synthesis, the formal analysis and the “de-construction” that brings out foreground and line as significant artistic factors.

In studies of models one sees an allusion, rather than a representation of the object, through foregrounds and symbols that are decanted into a construction that is less subjected to the object.

The essence of this language is condensed through the choice of the elements of composition. Foreground is invigorated, transformed into something virtual; color is limited; light sets the order of the chromatic values; line defines and constructs. His work seems to be influenced by neo-cubism, with personal accents where color is broken. White, cobalt blue, violets and siennas conform a limited and particular palette, adapted to this formal analytical process. Still-life and landscape, plus a few portraits. make up this transcription from reality.

The road covered in the quest for a language that will define the artist is a slow but sure path toward his own visual territory, the key to which is unveiled through marks installed in a field full of content, achieved with subtle transparencies, touches of vibrant color, and superposition created in the projection of emotions. Sentiment is not absent and is expressed in the way the pictorial surface is treated and in the vocabulary that reflects an aesthetic representation.

The combination of the tensions in the visual field, the movements between line, sign and subject, design a scripture whose identification with the American cultural horizon is evident in the emergence of geometrically oriented figuration, pregnant with abstraction, indicating a vocabulary with a code containing his constant symbolism.

The artist has taken up the task of investigating our cultures. Archaeological sources will be the next reference point. Cerro Colorado and the theories about this culture in Alberto Rex González's studies and findings would expand his work with new aspects of South American reality; charcoal and oil works would mark the way for an appropriation, in the sense of “seeing”, within that cultural context, a relationship with pictorial trends where construction signifies and alludes to a vision of the cosmos.

This kind of language considers pointed elements, zigzags, sequences of segmented lines in groups inscribed on a visual plane within a containing plane, like a moving and fluctuating river. The strength of the subject acts like a rock or stone; the symbol's incisive cuts leaves a mark that invades the subject and remains deposited in its bosom.

Desire rules the paintbrush, which seeks a space in which to unfold a scriptural state within the chromatic earth, already developed within the geometric relations implemented in each composition. The muralist origin, the return to the ashlar, to the ornament, can be seen in the texture of the table where the foreground is established by means of a mobile architecture. Light acts by shining on the course of the scripture.

The transparencies, the austerity, the gradual stripping of the material and the figurative accumulation ends up in a synthesis that declares the established relations in the visual field as essential, leading to an essential scripture.

The pictorial progression is rendered dynamic, advancing from the edges toward the center, in horizontal and vertical sequences. Orthogonality is always present in the composition and in the temporal nature of space. Here we see Torres García's statements, a source that is present in the development of Delmonte's artistic language. This order and rhythm derived from neo-plasticism have permitted the existence of a kind of invisible grid or mesh in the work of some of the artists of this school. And in others there is the implementation of an explicit form of visual vocabulary with alterations and arrangements of certain signs.

Zoomorphic presentations seem to be derived from a degree of abstraction, like the draconiform and pisciform signs together with the figure of the condor. The anthropoform evolves from written signs created with lineal strokes that give shape to shamans and hunters. The nature of the myth is evident in them.

The hieraticism of rhythm and the law of frontality within a framework of up-and-down order and perpendicular cross-lines lead, in the classic sense, toward an absolute idea.

On an architectural plane and in murals, the configuration points to the numerical and geometric harmonic measurements that the Torres school searched for incessantly, both in everyday life and in the creative field.

Looking at the map of America and the meaning that migration and immigration had in our culture -together with that other map of South America, placed upside down, as the Uruguayan maestro did, crowning the summit- we see, once more, the vision of art as a cultural thought, and a drawing of attention to the meaning of that orientation.

Alberto Delmonte and the other artists who have contributed to creating an interpretation of these proposals -among them, those who founded the "Ojo del Río" group together with Delmonte- also created this vision, and so contributed to the legacy bequeathed by the men who built this American reality.

Translation: Edward Shaw