Alberto Delmonte

Prologue

Authentic art has always tended toward the knowledge and spiritual development of man. Accordingly, in order to produce this, works of art—objects of civilization—should identify with values that arr established from a contemporary standpoint.

From Impressionism onward, a rupture with the three-dimensional space that had been accepted since the Renaissance took place. A new way of plastic thinking was born. Liberated from representation and theme, artists create according to their needs and emotions.
Images respect the two-diimensional surface and works are conceived as autonomous plastic constructions with laws of their own.
Therefore, if we want to be fair, recognition must be our first point of departure: art of the 20th century was a leap toward greater freedom for man. This being the case, as men who live and work in this era, we cannot deny this century’s legacy.
However, I cannot help thinking of Ortega y Gasset: that because I am a man of my time, I accept its norms, but am not obligated to accept its enormities.

And our time, particularly the past few decades, has brought to light enormities that we cannot avoid dealing with without being at fault, either by action or by omission. One of these, perhaps that with which we are most directly involved, culture and its manifestations, has ceased to be a product of direct integration between human beings, to become something elaborated by professionals, skillful operators who respond to the interests of a group or the market. In today’s society, a group of “specialist” manipulators or shapers of “opinion” have the power and the quality of generating tastes, fads and consuming to such a limit as to transform culture into a mere system for producing necessities.
We live in a directed culture that erases differences and gives rise to equal habits.
All these factors enable visualizing the medium in which we must carry out our activities. The pressures, factors of success, frustrations and marginalizations.

También como se gestan las necesidades, las modas, “algunas forzadas aceptaciones” y elogios extemporáneos o brillos “estatuídos”. And just like necessities, fads, “some forced approvals”, inopportune praise, or “established” highlights are shaped. This emerging situation obviously also reached as far as our environment, leading to the appearance of supposed experts who take charge of instigating a constant renovation of expectations and products, without a care as to whether these values are supported in plastic language or not. It can definitely be observed that toward the end of the century, problems, conditions and effects have developed that motivate concern, at least on my part:

• A breakdown of language and the undermining of any possible objective critical judgment.
• The predominance of the superficial and ephemeral with respect to permanent works and the concept of transcendence.
• The appearance of supposed values created by the market.
• A globalization of plastic experience beyond any possibility for particular, national or regional styles.

Each of these points deserves particular attention, but I will expand upon this final aspect. In this sense, I persist in what I have written on other occasions.

To think of man in isolation makes no sense. Man exists insofar as he spends every moment of his life relating to others and communicating with the environment in which he is immersed.
Therefore, the point of departure is man in society, or, to put it another way, man in relation to the space he inhabits, with the men of that community, in relation to himself and with other peoples.
Accordingly, by way of their collective and historical experiences, human groups gradually develop their own manners of resolving these relationships. This way, an integral way of life arises, created by a society socially and historically.

Understood from this perspective, culture appears as the medium created by man to institute his own voice, his dialogue with humanity. It is the medium through which the human group joins forces and identifies on the basis of feelings, values, knowledge and experience, focusing on shared symbolic horizons and life strategies in common.
It is worth mentioning that culture is the result of a social and historical process carried out by a particular population; for this reason, each people elaborates its own culture, which is its only possible response (among others that are equally legitimate for other peoples).
In Argentina, this is a problem that is not yet completely resolved, one that has accompanied us all through the lifetime of this country.

One class of leader structured the justification of their policy by way of myths and ideological mechanisms that were organized in a pedagogical and cultural system. It planned sociocultural practices through which it achieved homogenizing tastes and necessities. This is what is denominated dominant culture. Buenos Aires, and within it, the forty blocks of its downtown area, manipulated cultural thinking that over the years would become the frame of reference for the entire country. We accepted this model and made it our own. That is our greatest mistake. Instead of evolving based on nature, we substituted it with another.

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Kusch used to say: America finds itself divided between the truth of its nature and the truth of cities’ fiction. And that fiction ignores the American subconscious and develops an official history that makes us believe that the city is the nation. We all are men who make culture based in the city, based precisely in the place where America is refuted and where success is possible so long as our creation corresponds with accepted international models. These may be the reasons—among others—we fail to feel that we pertain to something that we all have in common, because we have learned to be through their way of seeing us. To a large extent, we are like they thought we were. For us to identify with the place where we live, to make plans and dream, requires an effort on our part to observe three aspects: feeling ourselves, knowing ourselves and wanting to be. In fact, it involves the intention to think, and to think about ourselves. Also, not to remain in the theoretical field only, but to actively carry out a practice as an inhabitant of this continent.

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As philosophy and science do, art contributes to culture through its incentive to travel a path “inward”, toward one’s self, which in fact, must be done by those who cultivate it. Artists must do so aside from their tastes, modalities or fads, demonstrating that originality, as Max Raphael confirmed, “Is not the impulse to be different from the rest, nor to produce what is totally new; it is to grasp the origin, the roots, both ours and those of things”. While there is an everyday reality that surrounds us, hounds us, limits and conditions us, there are other, invisible realities which, precisely due to their everyday nature, we sometimes do not see: the secret mandates of the earth, of our nature. A gaze preoccupied from here and for us, in order to perceive the Río de La Plata with its lion’s mane color, the immensity of our territory, its ochres and grays, the horizontality of the plains we inhabit and the intuitive need to oppose it, to compensate with successive verticals. Enclosed within every one of these things is where the poetics of the place where our life transpires can be found.

In this sense, my painting should be understood and situated within these boundaries. I feel I am part of a plastic family that is working beyond the limits of everyday reality. And it does so prioritizing gesture, symbols and abstraction. I can name them: Klee, Tamayo, Bissier, Tápies, Torres García, Lam, Gambartes... and the differences should not come as a surprise, but rather everything that unites them should be noticed: the tone, the organization of a good design and being continuations of a plastic tradition. As a person, I also affirm my desire to continue to be loyal to my ideals, and my respect for the conviction that ethics and aesthetics should stay closely tied together.
Also, the certainty that action and creation should contribute to the plan of human evolution and development. Therefore, the concept of unity, of order, will always be present in my works.

Translation: Tamara Stuby