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Lot Essay
“If you don’t do what you must in painting, then where are you going to do it? Where can one be absolutely free if not in art?”[1] Poised at the crux of freedom and aesthetics, de la Vega’s questions epitomize the countercultural impulse that fueled the young Argentine avant-garde in the 1960s. Self-taught, he improvised a highly idiosyncratic visual language based on transformation and anamorphosis, developing a new artistic syntax taken from the objects and symbols of the contemporary world—plastic tokens and children’s toys, pop culture and magazine advertising. De la Vega was a member of Argentina’s Nueva Figuración group, active between 1961 and 1965, and alongside Luis Felipe Noé, Rómulo Macció, and Ernesto Deira he evolved an expressionist idiom rooted in the period’s existential and anti-aesthetic convictions.
Between 1963 and 1966, de la Vega developed the series Monstruos (or Bestiario), to which the present Untitled belongs. His “monsters” evolved out of the earlier Formas liberadas, no longer extant, in which ruptured paintings and frames were used as the material substrate of new objects. “Those works, more three-dimensional than flat,” de la Vega explained, referring to the Formas liberadas, “were the origin of the beings that I have now incorporated into the traditional canvas, and whose movements I pretend are not subject to the boundaries of the work, but to an autonomy that springs from their seemingly real weight.”[2] He alludes to the creatures that appear in such works as Esquizobestias no. 1 (1963) and Indecisión (1963), which established his method of doubling; the “schizobeasts” are rendered both in black-and-white and in three-dimensional, collaged color. Their duplicity may mirror the unraveling reality of post-Peronist Argentina; at a visual level, their anamorphic projection destabilizes form through disfiguration, instability, and monstrosity.
De la Vega’s work evolved further during his stay in the United States between October 1965 and April 1967, when he taught at Cornell University under the “Latin American Year” program and worked in New York City in the company of Noé and fellow Argentines Antonio Berni, Marta Minujín, and critic Jorge Romero Brest. “There everything is real, super-real,” de la Vega remarked of North America upon his return to Argentina. “Reality strikes you and forces you out of the unreality that you live in here.”[3] The present Untitled dates from this stay in America, during which time his work began to critically engage consumer culture and popular media stereotypes as he probed the hyperreality of Pop and psychedelia. His beasts infiltrated the capitalist (and developmentalist) spaces of the corporate world before eventually receding, supplanted by the re-emergence of the human figure. De la Vega found meaningful international recognition during this time, highlighted by the Special Prize for Argentine painting at the III Córdoba Bienal in 1966. American critic and curator Sam Hunter, one of the jurors, declared him “one of the few powerfully original artists in the Bienal,” able to combine “the mechanically repeating imagery and grinning masks of Warhol’s movie idol cult with expressionist violence, distortion, and a grotesque suggestion that is one of the few authentic notes in the exhibition.”[4]
The present Untitled numbers among the last works of de la Vega’s Monstruos series. Like its predecessors, it presents mirrored “monsters”: in a pastel rainbow against a black ground, on the left, and beside it a beast whose flesh turns a dark, savage red as it trespasses its cut-out frame. They gaze blankly through appended eyeballs, which recall the blue glass eyeball in Indecisión as well as the rope- and button-eyes of the Italian artist Enrico Baj; their features, from toothy maws to jagged fur, are outlined in a raised, cursive scrawl. The doppelgänger effect is absurd and hallucinatory, a wry riposte to the disorder and hyperbolic culture of modern life, from New York to Buenos Aires.
“They will look at them because they try to place the viewer in my position of uncertainty in the face of reality and my own struggle with painting,” de la Vega remarked of his work and its audience. “I want my painting to be natural,” he continued, “without any limitations or formulas, improvised like life that grows where I don’t want it to and does what it feels like. Other times it’s docile. I want my work to hit the viewer with the same intensity with which its parts collide with themselves, no matter how small they are. A mother-of-pearl chip on a blotch. The number next to a rock. A tinfoil animal. A chimera of smoke, beings measuring themselves against emptiness and a mirror so they can look at themselves.”[5]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Jorge de la Vega, quoted in Luis Felipe Noé, “Anti-Aesthetics,” trans. in Inés Katzenstein, ed., Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 66.
2 De la Vega, “Interview with Guillermo Whitelow,” quoted and trans. in Patrick Frank, Painting in a State of Exception: New Figuration in Argentina, 1960-1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 67.
3 De la Vega, “La razón de la sinrazón: Jorge de la Vega,” Primera Plana 5, no. 235 (June 27, 1967): 66, quoted and trans. in Frank, Painting in a State of Exception, 148.
4 Sam Hunter, “The Córdoba Bienal,” Art in America 55, no. 2 (March-April 1967): 87.
5 De la Vega, in Mari Carmen Ramírez, Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentinean Art (Austin: Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, 1999), 255.
Between 1963 and 1966, de la Vega developed the series Monstruos (or Bestiario), to which the present Untitled belongs. His “monsters” evolved out of the earlier Formas liberadas, no longer extant, in which ruptured paintings and frames were used as the material substrate of new objects. “Those works, more three-dimensional than flat,” de la Vega explained, referring to the Formas liberadas, “were the origin of the beings that I have now incorporated into the traditional canvas, and whose movements I pretend are not subject to the boundaries of the work, but to an autonomy that springs from their seemingly real weight.”[2] He alludes to the creatures that appear in such works as Esquizobestias no. 1 (1963) and Indecisión (1963), which established his method of doubling; the “schizobeasts” are rendered both in black-and-white and in three-dimensional, collaged color. Their duplicity may mirror the unraveling reality of post-Peronist Argentina; at a visual level, their anamorphic projection destabilizes form through disfiguration, instability, and monstrosity.
De la Vega’s work evolved further during his stay in the United States between October 1965 and April 1967, when he taught at Cornell University under the “Latin American Year” program and worked in New York City in the company of Noé and fellow Argentines Antonio Berni, Marta Minujín, and critic Jorge Romero Brest. “There everything is real, super-real,” de la Vega remarked of North America upon his return to Argentina. “Reality strikes you and forces you out of the unreality that you live in here.”[3] The present Untitled dates from this stay in America, during which time his work began to critically engage consumer culture and popular media stereotypes as he probed the hyperreality of Pop and psychedelia. His beasts infiltrated the capitalist (and developmentalist) spaces of the corporate world before eventually receding, supplanted by the re-emergence of the human figure. De la Vega found meaningful international recognition during this time, highlighted by the Special Prize for Argentine painting at the III Córdoba Bienal in 1966. American critic and curator Sam Hunter, one of the jurors, declared him “one of the few powerfully original artists in the Bienal,” able to combine “the mechanically repeating imagery and grinning masks of Warhol’s movie idol cult with expressionist violence, distortion, and a grotesque suggestion that is one of the few authentic notes in the exhibition.”[4]
The present Untitled numbers among the last works of de la Vega’s Monstruos series. Like its predecessors, it presents mirrored “monsters”: in a pastel rainbow against a black ground, on the left, and beside it a beast whose flesh turns a dark, savage red as it trespasses its cut-out frame. They gaze blankly through appended eyeballs, which recall the blue glass eyeball in Indecisión as well as the rope- and button-eyes of the Italian artist Enrico Baj; their features, from toothy maws to jagged fur, are outlined in a raised, cursive scrawl. The doppelgänger effect is absurd and hallucinatory, a wry riposte to the disorder and hyperbolic culture of modern life, from New York to Buenos Aires.
“They will look at them because they try to place the viewer in my position of uncertainty in the face of reality and my own struggle with painting,” de la Vega remarked of his work and its audience. “I want my painting to be natural,” he continued, “without any limitations or formulas, improvised like life that grows where I don’t want it to and does what it feels like. Other times it’s docile. I want my work to hit the viewer with the same intensity with which its parts collide with themselves, no matter how small they are. A mother-of-pearl chip on a blotch. The number next to a rock. A tinfoil animal. A chimera of smoke, beings measuring themselves against emptiness and a mirror so they can look at themselves.”[5]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Jorge de la Vega, quoted in Luis Felipe Noé, “Anti-Aesthetics,” trans. in Inés Katzenstein, ed., Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 66.
2 De la Vega, “Interview with Guillermo Whitelow,” quoted and trans. in Patrick Frank, Painting in a State of Exception: New Figuration in Argentina, 1960-1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 67.
3 De la Vega, “La razón de la sinrazón: Jorge de la Vega,” Primera Plana 5, no. 235 (June 27, 1967): 66, quoted and trans. in Frank, Painting in a State of Exception, 148.
4 Sam Hunter, “The Córdoba Bienal,” Art in America 55, no. 2 (March-April 1967): 87.
5 De la Vega, in Mari Carmen Ramírez, Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentinean Art (Austin: Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, 1999), 255.