CLORINDO TESTA, THE ARCHITECT THAT LIVES IN THE MUSEUMS
On December 11th, at the Fine Arts National Museum (MNBA) of Beuenos Aires (Argentina), inaugurates an exhaustive exhibition of Italian-Argentinean plastic artist and architect, Clorindo Testa. Bringing together artworks from 1968 onwards the aim of the exhibition is to pay tribute to one of the most important figures of the Argentinean 20th century, his work and legacy in the South American country.
Under María José Herrera and Mariana Marchesi-artistic director of the Museum- curatorship, Clorindo Testa: "Esta es mi casa" (Clorindo Testa: “This is My House”) brings together artworks made through diverse disciplines that highlight the visual thinking of Testa and its hybrid nature between plastic arts and architecture. Thus, the exhibition explores the crossroads of disciplines and presents the ways in which his works are nourished by the techniques of architecture in the representation of space, tools with which he works on topics related to urban planning and ecology.
"As an architect, Testa thinks on the fallacies of modernity and its functionalism, criticizes the overcrowding and orderly routines to which the contemporary citizen is subjected. From the painting, disarms the postulates of the modern and rationalist architecture, that one that had marked its formation ", explained the curators.
The work that opens -and crowns- the exhibition at the MNBA is a reconstruction of Ampuntalamiento para un museo (Shoring for a Museum, 1968). On the one hand, because it’s the clearest representations of the combination of the two worlds that the artist inhabited-architecture and art. On the other, because it was exhibited for the first time in a collective exhibition that took place in the same museum fifty years ago. In addition, from the museum they explained the symbolic load that this installation had at that time, when Testa introducing an undoubtedly architectural device in the space united its two passions pointing out the "crisis that institutions were going through at that time".
"The paradox that makes architecture a static moment, frozen in time, recovers a disturbing dynamism in the plastic production of Testa," said Andrés Duprat, the museum director. "If in its architectural brutalism it persecuted the raw truth of the matter that sustains the habitat, with emphasis on the abstract geometry that modulates constructions and urban life, in its plastic work it replicates the gesture, defying the conventions on art and its circuits of legitimation "
Clorindo Testa: "Esta es mi casa" opens the doors of the first floor of the Fine Arts National Museum next Tuesday. The exhibition is free and will be exhibited until February 17th.
