Oscar Smoje Maggio
Boutique de Impresión Buenos Aires
Oscar Smoje’s (Buenos Aires, 1939) new exhibition of works on paper, Oso inédito, is worthy of celebration, since it is increasingly difficult to see this artist’s production in public. Smoje does not usually concern himself with his exhibitions, he has no time; from his position as Director of the Palacio Nacional de las Artes, in Buenos Aires, he determines those of others, as was the case of the recent Menos tiempo que lugar. El Arte de la Independencia, a project curated by Alfons Hug that included videos, photographs, paintings and installations by 22 artists from Latin America and Germany. The fact is that this artist and university teacher has been, since 2006, the director of this venue for temporary exhibits which also organizes the national salons in all its disciplines and amasses the award-winning works that everyone knows as the Palais de Glace (inaugurated in 1910 as an ice skating rink).
Oso inédito displays 40 works in graphite, ink and colored pencil, and acrylic from the past twenty years at Maggio Boutique de Impresion, the exhibition space inaugurated two years ago by Sebastián Maggio in the Recoleta neighbor hood. Between abstraction and figuration, the works bring into play private emotions (memory of the Croatian father) and public tributes (Pessoa and his heteronyms), childhood memories and mature flights. These drawings and paintings display a remark- able expressiveness; Smoje’s passion for life and work can be felt as much in the accurate traces in black ink as in the compositions where everything is life and movement.
“The idea of staging this exhibit originated many years ago, following my first encounter with Oscar Smoje. I knew his work: the series Las Sombras, Los Boxeadores, El Buzo, the series featuring traces of a lost civilization [satirically designated by the artist as Maldonásica Palermitana]...”, curator Grace Bayala writes in the catalogue. “A decade later (...) time (...) found us once again in the studio (...). On this occasion, choosing the best from among hundreds of paintings. ‘I want us to search in the same way one looks for and finds the best wines in a wine cellar...’, he said to me”. The analogy between good wines and the best works is not random. Smoje is an excellent and experienced chef, and he knows how to accompany the fruit of his culinary creations.
Smoje’s work “diary and collage of this country”, as Miguel Briante has commented often treads the path of political and social com- mitment, the same commitment that led him to design the newspa- per Noticias, in the 1970s, and to accept a the positions of Secretary of the Cultural Outreach Department of the National University Art Institute, and Director of the Cultural Outreach Program of the De la Cárcova Art School between 1994 and 2000.
