Impossible for the hallucinated eye to stop vibrating. The feeling is intense; The colors, pregnant and the flashes of lights, unforgettable. Benveniste/Rodríguez: Perception and illusionwith curatorship of María José Herrera, in the National Museum of Fine Arts integrates jewels of early production along with recent pieces of the couple formed by Perla Benveniste (Buenos Aires, 1943) and Eduardo Rodríguez (Buenos Aires, 1934).
Benveniste and Rodríguez create hypnotic pieces. For the obnubilated pupil it is difficult to take off from its magnificent boxes, reliefs and columns-some with internal mechanisms that create moving images and trigger optical-luminous games-are the result of research developed by artists since the sixties.
Among the 31 works exhibited by Rodríguez can be seen “temporalized space”, with which he obtained the Grand Prix of Honor in the I Contest of Visual Research in 1970. There is also another piece of the seventies, ceded by the Palais de Glace, and creations of 1990 to the present, belonging to the artist’s collection.
From Benveniste, it is exhibited, along with 24 other works, “Retroanteroversion”, a kinetic box that the artist made in 1969, and donated to the museum. In addition, 2010 series are presented, made with wood and elastic, and more current ones, created with acrylic, acetate and motor, from their personal collection.
“People think that the bars move or have water, but it is not so,” says Benveniste. when the School of Fine Arts ended, the artist began experimenting with acrylic bars, shapes and colors. With Rodríguez, they lived in a workshop that Julio Le Parc had given them after going to Paris. Rodríguez’s friendship and Le Parc was – and remains – so deep that Rodriguez came to represent his friend so that he could marry Marta García, mother of the three children of Master Mendoza, when he was in Paris. After the wedding and legal instances, Marta’s parents allowed her to travel to meet the artist in Europe.
Rodríguez, in that first era, made mobiles. In addition, he received the letters from his friend Le Parc and, in this way, he learned how the panorama of kinetic artists in the Old world was. Le Parc had founded the Visual Art Research group (Grav), with which he conducted revolutionary experiences with color, the effects of light, movement and, spectator participation. Artistic praxis was linked to the reflective, both individual and collective act.
“When Julio (Le Parc) he left, I was still in the School of Fine Arts. When I finished it, I left very excited about what I wrote from there – Rodriguez remembered from that time. Heat of the lamps to produce movement ”.
“Every time I was more excited,” Rodríguez evokes in relation to that system that the young man parcred in Paris along with other artists and which was inspired for his own works. With absolute resource economy, he was developing his kinetic works. “I was very interested in Vasarely’s movement and the concepts of José Camón Aznar in his book The time in artthat gave me a different vision.
“I started working thinking about space and time, and there is no space without time, or time without space,” says the artist. idea. It can be a bit esoteric, a bit inexplicable, but it encouraged me a lot to continue. ”
Art and life in motion
Rodríguez was a scholarship to go to Paris while Benveniste stayed taking care of her baby son. During the French May, when he had already won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale, Le Parc was expelled from France for making posters to support the claims of Renault workers. “We are the power,” said one of the posters he had in his car, along with pamphlets supporting the workers who were in a plant on the outskirts of Paris and who the police planned to evict. While Rodríguez could not meet his friend as planned (the idea was to present a series of characters from the art world), he managed to take advantage of the trip and after a few months, he returned to Buenos Aires and exhibited at Di Tella.
In that transit, the premises of the tax were key, which proposed an approach with people without going through the critics filter. In fact, the group denounced the uniformity of artistic production and generated a new relationship between the work and the public, taking out the art of white cube and museums.
Le Parc proposed to put the artist at the level of a common worker: “Transform the claim to do works of art for constant experimentation. Restain from the judgment of connoisseurs and critics, and take into account popular opinion.” His concern was “to free the spectator from the inhibitions that art causes with his supposed category of superior thing and develop in him the ability to action and reaction.”
“We rely on the concepts of Le Parc: use the idea of real movement, that people can touch, perceive, feel that it is not a static picture, if not the real movement that he worked,” says Benveniste. Of his early years in Di Tella in the exhibition, the jewel box that the artist donated to the museum is exhibited.
The hallucinated retina
In Di Tella, Benveniste also worked with dance and body expression, and even made performances that included electronic music. His was always investigating, as he did with the elastic that he ended up buying in the Once neighborhood and with which he created works that make up the exhibition.
For its part, Rodríguez works the acrylic as if it were a precious stone. He learned to use it when the Argentine Chamber of Plastic invited Antonio Berni, Rogelio Polesello and Emilio Renart, among other great Argentine artists, to do works of art with this material. The camera not only gave acrylic classes but of all the plastics and materials they produced, from telgopor even polyester. In addition, he gave materials to the artists to make their pieces. The factory managers taught them how to cut, hit and fold that novel material. “For me it was a discovery,” says Rodríguez. It is, explains the artist, a very malleable material, which can be cut, sand, fold, polish. It can be transparent or opaque becoming or color can be added. “All that gave me a range of possibilities that other materials did not give me: that’s why I dedicated myself a lot to investigating it,” he recalls. Over time, he bought the tools to do the works: Sierras, grinder, sander, polisher, lathe.
With the light, Rodríguez’s acrylic sizes produce an indescribable effect: once again, the hallucin retina with the light drawings that unleash the pieces in acrylic, which look like a strange glass. First, Rodríguez Hand size, with hammer and chisel. One can imagine the reconcentrated artist; In a time, unique. Then sand, polish, observe almost imperceptible details for the non -seasoned observer, and get transparent, ethereal pieces. The pupil thanks ecstatic.
Benveniste/Rodríguez: Perception and illusion It is exhibited at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Av. Del Libertador 1473. From Tuesday to Friday, from 11 to 19.30; Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 to 19.30. Until June 15. Free.
