ES BALUARD RECOVERS DITTBORN'S AEROPOSTAL PAINTINGS

By Álvaro de Benito

Es Baluard organizes Eugenio Dittborn. Pinturas Aeropostales, the first solo show in Spain of Eugenio Dittborn (Santiago, Chile, 1943), one of the key names in the development of Latin American conceptual art in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition focuses on the production of his aeropostal paintings, an artistic instrument that materializes his research and reflection on materials, the physical limits that constrain painting and its distribution and circulation.

ES BALUARD RECOVERS DITTBORN'S AEROPOSTAL PAINTINGS

These hybrids, which are torn between painting and epistolary and which form a double technical body, were created in the early eighties in Santiago, Chile, as a result of these reflections on the supports and in full search of solutions to develop the supports that would allow him to capture challenging techniques to traditional painting and technique. Thus, Dittborn made use of common and even poor materials to create these supports. Cardboard, methacrylate, cotton or plywood were forging the physical space required for his purpose.

 

The aim of these aeropostal paintings was the creation of a design that could be folded and sent, and that linked with the facilities of mail art for its distribution. In this transfer, Dittborn also finds answers to the concepts of local and global, territoriality and movement, and recovers the idea of circumstantial passage. The envelopes end up being shown together with his paintings and texts, creating a network of archive, catalog and record of that distribution and those involved, which also become witnesses of the interconnectivity of the artist with his distant environment at a time of political difficulty in his native Chile. For that reason, the artist himself alludes to the fact that “the journey is the politics of my paintings, and the folds, the unfolding of that politics”, elevating the mechanical and logistical to a concept of greater personal and artistic repercussion.

 

Es Baluard presents three large-format paintings, the result of the deployment and exhibition of the chosen aeropostal paintings, occupying a large extension of the space. Within each painting, Dittborn incorporates in its folds information, elements and images of third parties and creates, with his intervention and decontextualization, an alternative narrative.

 

Eugenio Dittborn. Pinturas Aeropostales can be seen until June 15 at Es Baluard Museu, Plaza Porta de Santa Catalina 10, Palma de Mallorca (Spain).

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