Alberto Delmonte

By J. M. Taverna Irigoyen

Alberto Delmonte, 20 years of pictographs and constructivist fervor.

The Universal Constructivism associated with Torres-García permeates some of the most interesting works that comprise the concept of a Rio de la Plata school. Rather than adoption or influence as a language, it is fundamentally a consolidation in theoretical-conceptual terms, as a sort of energy, which in turn transfers additional inner vitalities that pertain to shape-signs in space. What it sustains is the order, construction and redesign of the flat plane; at the same time, however, it is the accord, the poetics and the transcendentalism of dynamics of association and stimulation in material, colors, lines and points, the tensions of space itself.

Alberto Delmonte figures among the masters who, from Argentina, have projected a plastic idea of Americanism governed by synthesis, the mystic-religious and a mineral palette that expands beyond effects. With sustained rigor and without polytheism, his painting possesses and offers its own cosmogonic phonetics. Because his painting is one of internal inflections and carefully articulated values. In his gravely intoned planes, there is no sensation of formulas or factic mannerisms. And yet, a work by Delmonte is unquestionably and distinctly his own.

At first glance, something of this can be noted in the choral nature of the important group of works on exhibit in the halls of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The twenty years of labor selected (1985-2005) show him within that cuasi liturgy of relinkage between opposites of heaven-earth and man-woman, the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the profane. Still, in the circular nature of his abstraction, marks of time and infinity emerge, of realism and invention, of ritual and celebration. And It is all within a strange, fluid syncretism. It is dramatically testimonial. Secret and immense. It takes less than fifty works to certify the maturity of his mark.

It is a script of juxtaposed lines and planes, of cabbalistic signs that transpose a summary interpretation of chromatic fields that orthogonally assemble and articulate a before and after for the eye.

The space suggested deploys its tensions without ceding to limits. The material, that activation of the senses transmitted by pigment, distributes the sensitivity of ochres and earth tones, deep blues, penetrating whites and penetrated black. Memory is inscribed in these minuscule histories, and over the continuity of the signs that feed it, there is a Heiddegerian angst coding other dialogues between life and death, between solitude and the abyss. One example of the drama of the plane is Elevación [Elevation] from 1998, which establishes links in spite of the inapprehensible void suggested. Between the conventional aspect of pyramid shaped forms and linear transit, El poder de la luz [The power of light] from 2000 extends bridges to permit the eye to cross and redimension. Or the blurred effect of Altiplánico [Of the high plateau] from 2002, with rhythms that discover—above light textures and patterns—the golds of a divined subterranean civilization made of popular mythologies, regenerated time and again on new skins.

Delmonte does not decipher, but rather interprets into pure plastic values that segment found between the real and the imagined. It is a territory of memory, which in his case is truly a cultural imposition of the American being. He resignifies it again and again on his planes, as well as in volumes that induce the archaic, naked and primitive, where iron and wood, stone and wire enter space and pass beyond the totemic, to achieve the virtuality of a pilgrim’s authentic preamble.

Translation: Tamara Stuby