Norberto Gómez

The anthological exhibition Norberto Gómez. Works 1967-2008, featuring over 50 works and held in OSDE Foundation’s Art Space, places the remarkable oeuvre of the artist on the foreground and allows us to view his career in perspective, to verify the relevance and authenticity of that work, hard to carry out, hard to contemplate. Even more so when we are reminded that these works were exhibited in Arte Nuevo Gallery right in the midst of the military government and, as pointed out by the Argentinean Association of Art Critics, in the National Museum of Fine Arts; one of its “barbecues” of entrails was shown in the exhibition organized by the AACA, termed Argentina 78; the year of the world football cup. At that time the artist worked with no previous sketch, with the hands in the “dough”, in polyester resin, the material which (even when it resulted toxic to him) also revealed to him other possibilities of sculptural work; to “provoke the memory” it persisted in that series until 1983.

But before this, after completing his first studies, Gómez went to Paris in 1965 and worked in Julio Le Parc’s workshop. Here, initial sculptural pieces with geometric proposals, kinetic and optic developments, others that show his incursion in minimalism, some posterior ones that seem to have suffered a “melting”, dissolving their forms until becoming reduced to a formless mass, are included.

Behind the sculptures with ill-treated flesh, tortured bodies, disfigured entrails, arms of medieval aspect are exhibited –which perhaps represent the elements which inflicted the exhibited pain- that in spite of their heavy and metallic aspect are made in painted cardboard. Then, an enigmatic portico carved in gypsum leads to the works of the late ’80s. They are sculptures with ironic and provocative tones, which conceal falsehoods and give life to representations of hybrid, caricature-like characters, with mythological hues, military and sacred, and deceptively important in their pedestals of polyester resin, gypsum polychrome. Likewise, it is possible to see the Manos (Hands) in gypsum by the remarkable artist, who took the risk of confronting the spectator with ugliness and the repulsive, knowing, together with Arthur Danto, that “a work of art currently has no limits or aesthetic mandates. (…) The imperative of purity which defined the last phase of modernism has no particular relevance in the current practice and artistic sensitivity”. In coincidence with this, Castagnino Roldán exhibits a series of digitalized drawings by the artist.