Eduardo Stupía.

At the intersection of the artistic passions of both authors, the book and the exhibition share the vitality of poetry and the enriching discomfort of critical thinking. Stupía’s images do not illustrate the content of the diary, nor do they provide a linear order; rather, they constitute the link between two kindred spirits. They are graphic signs and blotches; they are silences but they are also sounds developed on the basis of the two pillars of his oeuvre: drawing and collage. “I am not an illustrator. Pictorial signs and drawings and the written word are like magnetic fields that attract and repel one another with equal intensity; in any case, they coexist, although always in tension and at odds, and they always withdraw into themselves, astringent and self-focused.

Like dream residues
While together with Jorge Mara, he is preparing the works he will present at the arteBA fair in Buenos Aires, Stupía is completing the selection of works which will participate in the 30th Sao Paulo International Biennial (September-December 2012), to which he was invited by the general curator, Luis Pérez-Oramas, who included him in the group show New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930-2006: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions (2007), to be featured at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). From its conceptual proposal − The Imminence of Poetics − the Sao Paulo Biennial intends to work with the concept of proximity, with the notion of constellations of works and artists.
Far removed from grandiloquence, Stupía’s creative process develops on the basis of the writing and rewriting of drawings using black ink on white paper − “black and white is a basic poetic element of this medium of expression” − and for some years now, of mixed media on canvas, some paintings in black and white, and some touches of color. A remarkable draftsman, Stupía also utilized written texts at the beginning of his career, when he drew comic strips of a nightmarish nature which perhaps reflected the turbulence of the context or an almost adolescent rebelliousness. Later, he compressed his landscapes and his characters into miniatures, populating his papers with micro-narratives which became chaotic and imprecise with time. In the works belonging to this period, the figures and scenes can be discerned from a short distance, but from afar the images have the appearance of hallucinated landscapes. Suddenly, mystery has taken possession of his dense calligraphies (with Oriental traits), strange graphic signs and lines, smudges and accumulations of blotches and glazes, with unexpected voids, fragments and fractures everywhere. These images appear increasingly as residues of dreams, traces without a final destination but endowed with undeniable vivacity. The contrast between luminosities and shadows creates balance rather than sadness and grief.
It is in the intimate ambit of that same studio, overflowing with papers − for a long time now, the artist has been accumulating books, manuals and encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines and notebooks, photo romance novels, movie brochures and music papers − that Stupía gave birth to the powerful collages he began showing in 2011, to the surprise of many. The collector-artist became an assemblage artist and the music director of an orchestra (in fact, in his youth the artist formed bands and played music in public) composed of papers of different caliber and origin representing instruments. In this way, Stupía currently composes collages using dissimilar elements and textures, forms and colors, which he cuts and pastes, and which seek their place in the rhythms of improvisation and harmony through the combination of old papers and new ink and paint traces.

Another collage
The text for the small catalogue accompanying the first exhibition he presented at the age of twenty was a surrealist poem composed by a female classmate at the School of Fine Art, which he attended because he was late to enroll in the Humanities program. “I remember the lady who owned the gallery was very angry and she told me that Ana − with whom I was head over heels in love − was a fool, that I was totally irresponsible, and that people would not understand anything”, the artist commented in his conversation with Arte al Día, highlighting the eternal conflict that still persists between images and words.
His love of literature and the printed word is long-standing. He was a bookseller, and he is a designer of book covers. And, picking up the torch from artist Juan Pablo Renzi (Argentina, 1940-1992), he designed the literary magazine Diario de Poesía, conceived, among others, by the poet Daniel Samoilovich, who published his texts in La balada de Timoteo, alongside collages and drawings by Stupía. “We have recently implemented, together with Guillermo Saavedra, a poetry book entitled kñlnkj [in the language of Buenos Aires city, somebody is said to be “del tomate” when they exhibit some degree of madness], a series of eccentric haikus concerning tomatoes written by him and accompanied by legends of mine.”
With a trajectory of over forty years, Stupía is currently an artist with a growing participation in the local and the international art scene, even more so following the “completely decisive relationship with Jorge Mara, thanks to his singular characteristics as a gallery owner, to his sensibility and talent not only to detect in the work its best profile, and based on this, host it (…) but to guide me even in the privacy of the studio.”
Stupía multiplies himself; his presence is requested even as a lecturer, as a curator (which he is not and does not wish to be) by young people who have confidence in his gaze. The presence of the artist is evident in shows and as an author of texts, as a jury member in salons and competitions, as one of the organizers of the exhibitions cycle La línea piensa, together with Luis F. Noé (Yuyo, for his friends), who saw his early works in the back room of Ruth Benzacar gallery in the 1970s, whose great generosity he recognizes and whom he acknowledges as his artistic father, “in the conceptual and I would dare say in the philosophic aspect as well. Yuyo’s idea that the line thinks − the recovery of drawing as an autonomous language beyond its interpretative uses − is not only the origin of the cycle bearing that title, which we implemented jointly as of 2006, but also a concept which, in my particular case, generated a radical turn in my way of understanding not only drawing but the way in which language manifests, builds and transforms itself.”
Pablo Ortiz, a prestigious Argentine composer of contemporary music who has been living, teaching and composing in the United States for a long time now, invited him to form part of the team that will present Gallos y huesos. It is a sort of oratory for choir singers, a harpist and percussion, based on a text by writer Sergio Chejfec, which will be presented in August at the Colón Theater Experimentation Center. Stupía will be in charge of the visual setting, not the staging. “There will be screens projecting still and moving images, without any sound and with a sequentiality which will be somehow in tune with the music. Another collage, if you will,” he concludes.

Profile
Eduardo Stupía was born in 1951 in Argentina, where he lives and works. He had his artistic training at the Manuel Belgrano School of Fine Art in Buenos Aires; he has shown his work at the local and the international level since 1972, and has been a teacher since 1984. Among his solo shows, special mention may be made of Recortes de inventario (2011), Obras 1976-2006 (2006) y Tinta sobre papel (1999), Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires; Obra reciente (2010), Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, IVAM, Valencia; Collages (2010), Centro Cultural Parque España, Rosario; Reflejos (2010), Obra reciente (2008) and Stupía (2004), Jorge Mara-La Ruche gallery, Buenos Aires; Stupía. Obra reciente (2009), Dan Galeria, Sao Paulo. The group shows in which he has participated include, among others, ¡Me arruinaste el dibujo1 Dibujo a cuatro manos (2011), together with Luis F. Noé, Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires; Contemporary Argentine Masterworks (2010), International Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Realität und Utopie. Argentina's Künstlerische Laufbahnvon der Gegenwart (2010), Akademie der Kunste, Berlín; Traversées du paysage (2004), Contemporary Art Gallery of the Hotel de Ville, Besançon; Arte argentino contemporáneo (2004) the Italo-Argentinian Cultural Institute, Rome; Escenas de los 80 (2003), Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires. His works are represented in the collections of leading museums in Argentina, and those of IVAM and MoMA. Among other distinctions, he was awarded the Grand Prize for Drawing at the National Visual Art Salon (2007, Argentina).