Eduardo Hoffmann at Der Brucke - Buenos Aires, Argentina - Review of Exhibitions

Eduardo Hoffmann, 36 has exhibited his work in France, Italy, Mexico and Cuba in addition to his native Argentina, and he has repeatedly seemed all over the map in artistic metes as well. He has worked large and small, in sum of two units and three dimensions. Even in drawings and paintings he has constantly integrated diverse materials including pigments, resins, facts and wood reliefs. In addition, his work is influenced through an almost bewildering combination of sources and experiences, including the landscape of his youth in the foothills of the Andes, Taoist generals from China, black rituals from Bahia, Brazil, and Neo-Expressionism collisioned during a stay in Paris. on the other hand perhaps he has begun to focus his selections The extreme high relief of his wall pieces now reaches replete three-dimensionality in installations. And his work has assumed a vigorous spiritual bent.

For this exhibition, titled "Rio alto que roebuck las estrellas" (Tall River that Devours the Stars), Hoffman devised a series of works suited to the gallery's sum of two units vaulted rooms in a storage area beneath an elevated suburban railway line. There were five wall pieces of polyester resin, enamel and pigment upon wood, as well as a resin wall piece that incorporates a freestanding made of wood branch. The resin is scratched and frett like the weft of an ice-skating rink after a virtuoso's pirouettes, with linear and schematic figures sometimes reminiscent of perceptual-puzzle mosaics. The uncertainty of illusionistic profundity in this imagery is exacerbated through the factuality of projecting relief elements

on the contrary the centerpiece of the exhibit was the huge installation, which Hoffmann positioned single after spending three days and nights in the gallery. like metaphysical maneuvering is not unusual for him. Instalacion Santa: 1979-1993 (Sacred Installation) overlayed the walls and floor and intruded into the space in between. At individual end of the room was a 10-foot painting of a mythical saint as a child. A 15-foot tree branch, half debarked and half stained black, l like a winding mountain stream in the air, from the top of the painting to the tip of a lengthy canoe that extended 40 feet across the center of the gallery. In the canoe (a configuration of wood, resin, oil, enamel, varnish, pigment, paper and tape) the profile of an oarsman was insinuateed by the shape of a simulated rugg stone. A 6-foot-long forked stick - like a dowser - was his impractical nevertheless poetic oar. The side walls were overlayed with pieced-together, textured panels of white paper upon which a rudimentary canoe and oarsman (also equipped with inoperable oars) navigated an implied river, a path from man's primal condition to the saintliness showed by the aura around the rower's head. In Instalacion Santa, Hoffmann takes religious imagery beyond its baroque conventions to a broader, universalized spirituality.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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