On Wednesday, September 18, the great exhibition of Fernando Maza at OTTO Gallery (Paraná 1158), which includes watercolors, oil paintings and engravings. The exhibition, curated by María Cristina Rossi, integrates a corpus of work that It has not been exhibited for three decades in our country.; some of them, even, have no record of having been shown.
“Beauty,” said Luis Felipe “Yuyo” Noé, his great friend, “for Maza is as free as his gesture of self-affirmation; it knows no confinement; its stage is both natural and cosmic space. She transcends all boundaries to reach new forms, which leads Maza to connect with, and at the same time differentiate herself from, informalism.”
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Maza is a creator of disturbing landscapes and although he did not exhibit frequently in Argentina, his impact was powerful. He received the Argentine National Painting Prize in 1984 and won the prestigious Palanza Prize in 1985. (awarded by the National Academy of Fine Arts), and in 1987 he was awarded the Grand Prize of Honor of the National Salon.
Besides, There are works of his in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MET), at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires (MNBA) and the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. In addition, his pieces are part of collections in Argentina, Germany, Belgium, Colombia, Holland, Italy, France and Switzerland, among other countries.
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The exhibition, curated by María Cristina Rossi, includes paintings from the artist’s last 30 years in which He created an iconography composed of letters, numbers, signs and architecture stripped down into solitary landscapes.
Maza created with a monochrome palette and also with subtle tones. In his case, the atmosphere is given by very worked colors, pasted or with transparencies. “It is a pictorial trick to create an ambiguous space like that of Japanese painting,” the artist had pointed out.
Fernando Maza: from informalism to its “disturbing atmospheres”
At the beginning of his training as an artist, in the late fifties He joined the informalist group, made up of Mario Pucciarelli, Luis Alberto Wells, Alberto Greco, Clorindo TestaKenneth Kemble, Silvia Torras, Noemi Di Benedetto, Kasuya Sakai, Olga Lopez, Enrique Barilari and Jorge Roiger.
Fernando Maza, 1986, oil on canvas. His adherence to the informalist movement was not total. Maza defined his work as “an abstraction without too many regulations.” And he stated: “If there were Orthodox in our group, I was certainly not among them.”.
Since 1960, Maza lived in New York, where he obtained a scholarship from the Pan-American Union to study graphic arts at the Pratt Graphic Art Center. The passion that had been awakened in him Goya’s engravings led him to experiment and adopt the etching technique with which he produced a great deal of work. He lived in New York until 1973. From 1973 to 1977, he resided in London.
Fernando Maza, 1975, oil on canvas, curved points. In 1978, he settled in Paris. In 1964 he returned to Buenos Aires and exhibited at the Bonino gallery. At that exhibition, Romero Brest presented him as “a young man with a mature air, a thoughtful gesture and a slow speech.” And about his creations he said: “He exhibits recent and less recent paintings that reveal a very intense elaboration, distinguished from each other by discoveries, deletions and barely perceptible metamorphoses.”
Fernando Maza, 2003, watercolor on paper. In the curatorial text, Rossi argues that the works Maza painted since the 1970s evoke landscapes invented from fragments of architecture that unexpectedly burst into nature, landscapes composed of arcades that project mysterious shadows, constructions covered by a disturbing atmosphere, inhabited by letters, signs and numbers that fall, rotate and contort.
“But,” the curator asks, “are they really landscapes?”Or are they scenarios that Maza built for the characters of an indecipherable comedy?
The exhibition can be visited at OTTO Galería | Paraná 1158 | Tuesday to Friday, 3 to 7 pm, or by appointment outside of these hours.
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