The Colombial Bienal de Arte of 1981
THE COLOMBIAN BIENAL DE ARTE in Medellin is the second biggest artistic event in South America, after the one in Sao Paulo. It is organized by Leonel Estrada, art critic and collector, and financed by banks and private firms. The Biennale opened on May 15th 1981, and was attended by over 500 artists, mostly from South and Central America, with other parts of the world represented by individual artists.
The overall image of the Biennale depended largely on the personal preferences of Leonel Estrada, the soul of the undertaking, who invited artists he knew or who were recommended to him critics. Jasia Reichardt and Pierre Restany were among his European advisers. Of all contemporary art, Leonel Estrada seems to be most interested in painting, hence its prevalence at the biennale, though, in my opinion, it by no means prevails in the present world. I missed drawing, photography, film, video, environment, action, i.e. fluid, border-line forms, represented by only a few artists. This is not intended as criticism of Estrada's concept, in fact, quite a number of critics believe painting to be on the rise again. Like elsewhere in the world, painting in South and Central America is varied: figurative and abstract, constructivist and hyperrealist, surrealist and expressionist. I am not going to lengthen the list but all those trends, in addition to many more, were present at the Biennale with no one striking as particularly noteworthy, though the most recent, neo-expressionism. represented in Medellin. among others, by the Berlin painter Salome Cichlarz, was attractive for its novelty and bright colours. Besides the quantitative domination of painting, no prevailing trend could be traced in Medellin. Hence remarkable individuals stood out all the more strongly. The spatial composition by Liliana Porter, a Colombian artist who lives in New York, was a poetic reflection on art as a gallery of imagination where the hand and the eye complement the few surviving details. That is why her arrangement evoked associations with a model from a historical or archaeological museum built as a setting for selected objects, with a sketch of a tomb providing the frame for a vase on a shelf, and with the story of a detail from a boat or a net hinted at by the schematic drawing of fishermen or the sea made up of a couple of lines and colours. In Liliana's gallery, as sophisticated as Borges's prose, things are accompanied by their images, blurred signs and inscriptions; her hand with a pencil or a brush between the fingers emerges as a memento of the artist's continuous presence.
Lydia Okumara, half-Japanese, half-Brazilian, likewise living in New York, built in Medellin an exceedingly pure, serene constructivist interior in which the tradition of twentieth century European art combined with Japanese order, with the neat Zen Cosmos. At the private view, the Argentine artist Marta Menujin, who relishes the spectacular, set fire to a dozen-odd-metre long puppet: a cotton-filled metal framework meant to represent Gardel, the famous tango singer of Medellin, who died burnt in an aircrash over the same town of Medellin. One-third of the participants in the biennale were women. Using the techniques of assemblage, environment, photography and collage, some of them carried out research into the essence of woman's existence, presenting the variety of dress and moods, looks and behaviour. To sum up the contribution of the South American artists mentioned before: they are some 35-40 years old; they seem to work with a dictionary of twentieth century art in their hand; they combine elements of various trends into heterogeneous wholes which evade classification; they transform and deepen the heritage of the past. Though somewhat eclectic, they seem to have a good deal to say.
The overall image of the Biennale depended largely on the personal preferences of Leonel Estrada, the soul of the undertaking, who invited artists he knew or who were recommended to him critics. Jasia Reichardt and Pierre Restany were among his European advisers. Of all contemporary art, Leonel Estrada seems to be most interested in painting, hence its prevalence at the biennale, though, in my opinion, it by no means prevails in the present world. I missed drawing, photography, film, video, environment, action, i.e. fluid, border-line forms, represented by only a few artists. This is not intended as criticism of Estrada's concept, in fact, quite a number of critics believe painting to be on the rise again. Like elsewhere in the world, painting in South and Central America is varied: figurative and abstract, constructivist and hyperrealist, surrealist and expressionist. I am not going to lengthen the list but all those trends, in addition to many more, were present at the Biennale with no one striking as particularly noteworthy, though the most recent, neo-expressionism. represented in Medellin. among others, by the Berlin painter Salome Cichlarz, was attractive for its novelty and bright colours. Besides the quantitative domination of painting, no prevailing trend could be traced in Medellin. Hence remarkable individuals stood out all the more strongly. The spatial composition by Liliana Porter, a Colombian artist who lives in New York, was a poetic reflection on art as a gallery of imagination where the hand and the eye complement the few surviving details. That is why her arrangement evoked associations with a model from a historical or archaeological museum built as a setting for selected objects, with a sketch of a tomb providing the frame for a vase on a shelf, and with the story of a detail from a boat or a net hinted at by the schematic drawing of fishermen or the sea made up of a couple of lines and colours. In Liliana's gallery, as sophisticated as Borges's prose, things are accompanied by their images, blurred signs and inscriptions; her hand with a pencil or a brush between the fingers emerges as a memento of the artist's continuous presence.
Lydia Okumara, half-Japanese, half-Brazilian, likewise living in New York, built in Medellin an exceedingly pure, serene constructivist interior in which the tradition of twentieth century European art combined with Japanese order, with the neat Zen Cosmos. At the private view, the Argentine artist Marta Menujin, who relishes the spectacular, set fire to a dozen-odd-metre long puppet: a cotton-filled metal framework meant to represent Gardel, the famous tango singer of Medellin, who died burnt in an aircrash over the same town of Medellin. One-third of the participants in the biennale were women. Using the techniques of assemblage, environment, photography and collage, some of them carried out research into the essence of woman's existence, presenting the variety of dress and moods, looks and behaviour. To sum up the contribution of the South American artists mentioned before: they are some 35-40 years old; they seem to work with a dictionary of twentieth century art in their hand; they combine elements of various trends into heterogeneous wholes which evade classification; they transform and deepen the heritage of the past. Though somewhat eclectic, they seem to have a good deal to say.
ENRIQUE GRAU (Colombia). 'Noche obseura del Alma', assemblage
LILIANA PORTER (Colombia). 'Parable of a Palace', fragment of a spatial composition
MANUEL CAMARGO (Colombia). 'From the Gonzales series', crayons
MARTA MENUJIN (Argentina). Gardels earthenware puppet
PATRICIA BONILLA (Colombia). 'Dream', photo-composition
