Rómulo Aguerre

Undoubtedly, this growing recognition of Aguerre’s oeuvre has been the consequence of the increasing appreciation of constructivist abstraction as one of the most powerful artistic currents of Latin America, a process which, after its initiation in the past century (in the 1990s), has gradually led to the discovery of new scenarios and important authors linked to it, like Aguerre, among others.

The exhibition comprises 29 works, among which the oldest dates from 1947 and the most recent one from 1980; yet the bulk of the works (a total of 14) correspond to the 1950s, precisely the years when the artist performed his researches in the already mentioned modality of abstraction.

However, it should be pointed out – as is also evidenced in the show – that Rómulo Aguerre´s photography developed along his career in parallel with the succession of artistic currents which marked the changing standard of “the new” in Western art of the 1950s through the 1970s, the practice and circulation of which became at that time more internationalized and synchronic within the West in general, including Latin America and the peripheral regions of Europe. Hence, in Aguerre’s body of work, the temporal prevalence of constructivist abstraction is followed by that of expressionism or abstract informalism, and the latter by that of forms of exploration related to pop- art and the graphic currents that played an important role in the art of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Nevertheless, this need of permanent “updating” contained in Aguerre’s work in its temporal itinerary does not acquire the quality of a mimetic movement of the “avant-garde” artistic proposals of the time, nor does it cause the assemblage of the author’s production to become fragmented into separate compartments. The reasons for this lie in two characteristics that are constantly found in this work throughout various decades: one is the permanent laboratory experimentation, which comprises the widest range of possible explorations, such as superimposing or fragmenting negatives; plays of lights and shadows, including luminous strokes; toning during the process of developing; photomontages and collages; intervention of the photographic image with other materials, and several others; the other characteristic is the permanent tendency toward abstraction, which extends beyond the specific research into pure abstraction.

Whether shooting a nude or a portrait − I am obviously talking about his artistic work and not the work carried out in his commercial studio – the photographer devised it based on the graphic and composition resources indispensable for the proposition of an abstract vision of the individual and not his/her direct representation.

Aguerre liked to call himself “artist-photographer”, and this exhibition confirms that he was never wrong in doing so.