Juan Carlos Distéfano
Fundación OSDE. Buenos Aires
Social and artistic memory in Juan Carlos Distéfano. Obras 1958- 2010, the wonderful exhibition featuring more than 70 works by the remarkable Juan Carlos Distéfano (Buenos Aires, 1933), held at the Art Space of the OSDE Foundation in Buenos Aires. A small untitled painting on cardboard dated 1958 marks the beginning of the itinerary, which includes drawings, painting and sculpture and an amalgam of both, and leads to La Urpila (a Quichua term that means “small dove”) en Buenos Aires, a 2010 sculpture created as a tribute to Ramón Gómez Cornet (1898-1964), the author of a 1946 oil painting bearing a similar title and addressing the same theme. Defenseless children are now represented by Distéfano not as a country girl but as a “cartonera” (a trash collector), who carries the Obelisk (emblematic monument of the city) in the cart she drags along Buenos Aires.
Curator María Teresa Costantin structured the show around four central nuclei: the first groups works of the 1960s, followed by those of the 1970s. Without any chronological order, the conducting thread linking the works in the third group is “the tense balance of the bodies”. The fourth axis displays the powerful sculptures of the artist’s most recent period, which include his recurring allusions to both the history of art and political and social issues; many of the works are dedicated to interrupted childhood, with a note of optimism in El chico de La Boca II, the boy with a toy that pays tribute to Víctor Cúnsolo (1898-1937). The first and colorful pieces, as for example Tres versiones, 1966, show the transition from painting to three dimensional works. Showing an impeccable facture and endowed with tactile sensuality, the sculptures have been executed with different materials; reinforecd polyester resin, mainly, makes them shine and the transparencies reveal anatomies and abandonments, torsions and desires, pains. In this respect, the essay by José Emilio Burucúa published in the catalogue and addressing the representation of pain in Distéfano’s work is very valuable.
