Lot Essay
La Gallina Ciega of 1973 belongs to the series of paintings created by Antonio Berni at the end of the 1950's. For nearly twenty years, the Argentine artist worked on his two fictional characters, Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel, paradigmatic figures of Latin American political and social reality.
Formally, the artist transformed the painting's surface into a field of constant tactile and visual stimuli, constructed with industrial waste taken from the slums surrounding the city of Buenos Aires. Combining painted zones with figures and markings equipped with cloths, tin cans, cartons, pieces of wood and metal door knobs, plastics and remnants, the artist achieves a contact between his artistic practice and real life. The sensorial attraction of the surface, overflowing with materials, textures, volumes and colors, is transformed into a vehicle of political expression in the discovery of the origin and the social connotation of those very waste materials.
Berni himself explained in Paris, in 1956: "Juanito Laguna, in the beginning, appears in my pictures under the form of images painted in oil in an Expressionist spirit, rich in pictorial material. I sought the equivalent of a hard, aggressive and unjust reality, by means of the play of contrasts and an impasto of sordid colors. Despite the progressive development towards the objective I had proposed, my means still seemed to me insufficient to offer my character's living environment. One cold, cloudy afternoon as I was crossing Juanito's slum, a radical change came over my vision of reality and its interpretation.... I had just discovered in the unpaved streets and unfinished construction sites a scattering of abandoned materials comprising Juanito's authentic setting: used pieces of wood, empty bottles, pieces of iron, cardboard boxes, door knobs, etc. These were the elements that served for the construction of the shacks in the world of those slums. From that date on, I went less and less to purchase colored pigments, for in the suburb where Juanito lived I could find the components for my canvases. Thus I began the cycle of collages with the story of Juanito Laguna."
Furthermore, Berni simultaneously works on several registers in the viewer's perception. In a society like that of Argentina, where the myth of "good taste" and refinement is the constitutive essence of local "aristocracy" and its relationship to artistic creations, Berni opens up the space of cultured art and invades it with glimpses and symptoms deriving from impoverished environments that disturb the possible viewers who frequent museums and art galleries.
La Gallina Ciega is a key work in Berni's evolution. After developing his great oil-collages of Juanito and Ramona between 1961 and 1964, it is between 1972 and 1974 that the same series acquires a new impulse with important works, dedicated to Juanito's daily life. Here, children's games stand out as a field of exploration where the artist places the festiveness and playfulness of the image in tension with the sordidness of the setting.
In moments when the distinction between high art and popular art become effaced, when kitsch is incorporated as a field of reflection and artistic experimentation, when fields of the decorative, melodrama and soap opera are claimed as cultural products, Antonio Berni's works acquire a new impulse of interpretation. It is in this context that La Gallina Ciega appears as an important example of the Argentine artist's creations on the history of this lad from the slums.
This work was presented for the first time in Mar del Plata in a one-man show in 1974, and was also included in the two most important retrospectives of the artist held in Buenos Aires in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in 1984, and in 1997.
Marcelo E. Pacheco
Buenos Aires, Oct. 1997
Translated by Dr. Wayne H. Finke
Formally, the artist transformed the painting's surface into a field of constant tactile and visual stimuli, constructed with industrial waste taken from the slums surrounding the city of Buenos Aires. Combining painted zones with figures and markings equipped with cloths, tin cans, cartons, pieces of wood and metal door knobs, plastics and remnants, the artist achieves a contact between his artistic practice and real life. The sensorial attraction of the surface, overflowing with materials, textures, volumes and colors, is transformed into a vehicle of political expression in the discovery of the origin and the social connotation of those very waste materials.
Berni himself explained in Paris, in 1956: "Juanito Laguna, in the beginning, appears in my pictures under the form of images painted in oil in an Expressionist spirit, rich in pictorial material. I sought the equivalent of a hard, aggressive and unjust reality, by means of the play of contrasts and an impasto of sordid colors. Despite the progressive development towards the objective I had proposed, my means still seemed to me insufficient to offer my character's living environment. One cold, cloudy afternoon as I was crossing Juanito's slum, a radical change came over my vision of reality and its interpretation.... I had just discovered in the unpaved streets and unfinished construction sites a scattering of abandoned materials comprising Juanito's authentic setting: used pieces of wood, empty bottles, pieces of iron, cardboard boxes, door knobs, etc. These were the elements that served for the construction of the shacks in the world of those slums. From that date on, I went less and less to purchase colored pigments, for in the suburb where Juanito lived I could find the components for my canvases. Thus I began the cycle of collages with the story of Juanito Laguna."
Furthermore, Berni simultaneously works on several registers in the viewer's perception. In a society like that of Argentina, where the myth of "good taste" and refinement is the constitutive essence of local "aristocracy" and its relationship to artistic creations, Berni opens up the space of cultured art and invades it with glimpses and symptoms deriving from impoverished environments that disturb the possible viewers who frequent museums and art galleries.
La Gallina Ciega is a key work in Berni's evolution. After developing his great oil-collages of Juanito and Ramona between 1961 and 1964, it is between 1972 and 1974 that the same series acquires a new impulse with important works, dedicated to Juanito's daily life. Here, children's games stand out as a field of exploration where the artist places the festiveness and playfulness of the image in tension with the sordidness of the setting.
In moments when the distinction between high art and popular art become effaced, when kitsch is incorporated as a field of reflection and artistic experimentation, when fields of the decorative, melodrama and soap opera are claimed as cultural products, Antonio Berni's works acquire a new impulse of interpretation. It is in this context that La Gallina Ciega appears as an important example of the Argentine artist's creations on the history of this lad from the slums.
This work was presented for the first time in Mar del Plata in a one-man show in 1974, and was also included in the two most important retrospectives of the artist held in Buenos Aires in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in 1984, and in 1997.
Marcelo E. Pacheco
Buenos Aires, Oct. 1997
Translated by Dr. Wayne H. Finke