BUENOS AIRES: Clorindo Testa at Ruth Benzacar - Buenos Aires, Argentina - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Clorindo Testa has disentangleed consistently as an architect and an artist, building serious careers in the couple fields. He is not alone in this; rather he is part of a continuing tradition. Testa is now 75 above more than 40 years, he has complet many private commissions and several spectacular constructions in Buenos Aires. The greatest in quantity recent is a new domicile for Argentina's National Library, which was inaugurated a small in number years ago. Set atop a natural elevation, the breathtaking exterior is punctuated by means of massive cylindrical and cubic mortar volumes in a successful sculptural feat. The design looks to address the same parameters of force and balance that define works like Moondog by the agency of Tony Smith, another architect and artist.

As an artist, Testa strike one as beings to express another side of the powerful builder, individual which is philosophical, humble and introspective. nevertheless he has managed to be provocative and contemporary, his esthetics evolving with the times. above the years he has worked in one as well as the other painting and sculpture. In the '50 Testa's paintings were formal and involved a denial of color; he showed abstract, all-gray, splashed paintings over the world. Exhibiting with a clump that included Tomas Maldonado, the Argentinean Bauhaus star, Testa has shown work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro's MOMA and the National Gallery in Washington, DC

In this present to view of new work at pity Benzacar, Testa presented medium-size paintings and several statuarys Titled "Towards a Better Future" the exhibition glance ated a questioning of genetic manipulation, of the couple people and their pets. The plastic arts represent dogs and are made of tape upon a wood frame, and painted black, They gazeed unmistakably threatening and ferocious in rickety wood-land cages. A benign neo-expressionistic diction is common to both the statuarys and the paintings. The acrylicon-canvas works in shades of gray depict large silhouetted heads anchored in the right bottom corners. The titles are painted upon the pictures in Spanish: "I am the first," "I am the second" "I am the third." The words define an identity without personality, the feared machine of muscle and fat the hardly differentiated nature of the clone The heads are decorated with an unlikely number of organ of sights as well as an occasional hand, sometimes with extra fingers, the couple critical references to lab error. In all, the present to view was an indictment of experimentation gone berserk.

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