Carmelo Arden Quin
Galería de las Misiones José Ignacio (Uruguay)
When he arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1935, Carmelo Arden Quin, born in Rivera in 1913, attended Joaquín Torres García’s famous lectures at the Theosophical Society in Uruguay and became fascinated with his teachings, which also allowed him to come into contact with the European constructivist trends. But despite his admiration, he was never influenced by the School of the South or by American Symbolic Abstraction. As of 1938, he became part of the literary and artistic milieu of Buenos Aires, where he took up residence for ten years.
His name is closely linked to Arturo magazine (1944), a key publi- cation that made it possible for Argentine art to function coin- cidentally with the European avant-garde movements, and whose main proposal was “do not copy, do not reproduce, invent”. Impossible to ignore the names of Edgar Bayley, Rhod Rothfuss, Tomás Maldonado, Lidy Prati, and Gyula Kosice, co-participants in this young proposal, in this breath of fresh air that changed Argentine art of the 1940s. After Arte Concreto-Invención, after two fundamental exhibitions, after the Inventionist Manifesto, the group com- prised by Arden Quin, Kosice and Rothfuss was formed: it adopted the name of Madi Art, a term that imitated the mysterious Dada and that would soon dissolve. This chapter of our his- tory of art is a sort of Latin American soap-opera saga that is still discussed with youthful passion by several of its main characters, who are alive and continue to produce art.
The purpose of this brief presentation is to highlight the exhibition “Geometría en Mutación” (Mutating Geometry), an important show through which Galería de las Misiones, in José Ignacio, Uruguay, pays tribute to Carmelo Arden Quin, who has lived in Paris since 1948. The works belong to different decades and reveal the characteristics of his practice: trimmed frames, irregular supports, illusionistic non-representation. An impeccable staging, 19 works that include the Coplanal blancbleu (1945) shapes − two geometric planes connected by an axis; Dualité and Taller (1947), both referring the viewer to Torres García’s color rhythms and black lines, collages of the 1950s, the planar shapes with volume of the 1950s, a structure he further developed in the 1970s. Manuel Neves points out that the works of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the recent ones, displayed at the exhibition, address experimentations with new materials and industrial paints. An extremely refined exhibition featuring a singular artist whose initial interest was poetry and who was in touch with seminal figures in Europe, among them, Theo van Doesburg and Max Bill.
