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This is the exhibition catalog of Nadar sobre la superficie [To Swim over the Surface] (Buenos Aires: Espacio Giesso, November 6–11, 1991). The text presenting the show, written by Fabián Lebenglik, besides briefly describing the characteristics of the works of each participating artist—Fabián Burgos, Jorge Gumier-Maier, and Graciela Hasper—explains the motive that has brought them together in this exhibition. To wit: having their fill “of only seeing artists that work over 'the sensuality of matter'”; that “none…stand out for imposing his work through shocking effects, but require a detailed and subtle glance.” On the other hand, they “restore the value of the smooth, decorative, and mental,” specifying, even, that “far from spontaneity, each work is the consequence of a plan.”
This exhibition was reviewed by Fabián Lebengik—almost with the same words—in the article published by the Página/12 newspaper on Tuesday, November 5, 1991, on page 22 of the visual arts section.
Art critic Fabián Lebenglik reviewed exhibitions by artists who belonged to what was later called “el grupo del Rojas” from the start; those whose visibility in the artistic media was linked to the Galería del Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas—an extension of the Universidad de Buenos Aires’s secretary of cultural—, an unavoidable space for the study of the 1990s Argentinean art scene. Among the artists that this gallery brought together, we can mention—besides Jorge Gumier-Maier (artist, art critic, and gallery director until 1997)—Fabián Burgos and Graciela Hasper, Feliciano Centurión, Martín Di Girolamo, Alberto Goldestein (curator of the Fotogalería del the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas since its opening in 1995) Sebastián Gordín, Miguel Harte, Agustín Inchausti, Magdalena Jitrik (who began to collaborate in the direction of the gallery since 1991), Luis Lindner, Alfredo Londaibere (director of the gallery from 1997), Nuna Magiante, Liliana Maresca, Emiliano Miliyo, Esteban Pagés, Ariadna Pastorini, Marcelo Pombo, Cristina Schiavi, Omar Schiliro, and Enrique Marmora, Sergio Vila, Benito Laren, among many others.
The reference to poetics of the past, such as Pop art, minimalism, Concrete art (under extremely personal reformulations), besides elements of kitsch, have helped to characterize the resources of expression of such artists. Toward the end of the decade, the artists who made up “el grupo del Rojas” were grouped, in a generic manner, as the representatives of the “1990s Argentinean art.”
The overt “opposition” to “pictorial expressionism,”a trend that Lebenglik emphasizes in this article, is one of the elements contained in the topics that defined the “Rojas style.” The same can be traced in previous articles by the same author—also published in the visual arts section of the Página/12 newspaper—such as, for example, “Hasper y Nigro. Dos artistas en el teatro” [Hasper and Nigro. Two artists in the theater] (Tuesday, August 8, 1989, p. 18, see record 764302) as well as in Jorge Gumier-Maier’s quasi manifesto that was published in La Hoja del Rojas [The Rojas Leaflet] (a. II, nº 11, Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, June 1989) titled “Avatares del Arte” [Masters of Art] (see record 768333).
Espacio Giesso was one of the alternative exhibition spaces during the nineties. Many of the “young” artists exhibited their works in this space.