Lot 55: Pintura # 7

Juan Mele (Argentinian B. 1923)
Pintura # 7
signed and dated 'J Melé 46' (lower right) and signed and numbered again '#7 Juan Melé Bs. As., Reconstituido 1975' (on the reverse)
acrylic on canvas
29¼ x 17½ in. (74 x 44 cm.)
Painted in 1946/1975.

Acquired directly from the artist.

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT EUROPEAN COLLECTOR


"The prehistory of the human spirit is thus closed," the artists of the group Arte Concreto-Invención precociously declared in their "Inventionist Manifesto," published in Buenos Aires in 1946. Roundly attacking representational art as pure illusion, "a formidable mirage from which man has always returned disappointed and weakened," the artists defended the constructive rigor of Concrete art: "Art of action, it generates the will to act. . . Concrete art makes people relate directly to real things, not to fabrications." Their precept, "Don't Search or Find: Invent," became the touchstone for the young members of the group, which included Maldonado, Hlito, Lozza, Iommi, and Melé, just twenty-three-years-old at the time.(1) Melé joined the group in October of 1946, participating in the Asociación's exhibitions and upholding its progressive ideological positions, which proclaimed the importance of the artist's educational role in the world and the humanist belief in the social function of art as a means to establish harmony across society.

Pintura # 7 , among Melé's first concrete paintings, epitomizes the Asociación's mandate for abstract art containing no reference to reality. Initially following the theories of Mondrian, who believed that highly simplified images could engage the universal absolutes underlying reality and model an ideal harmonious world, the group advocated rigorous, geometric abstraction. They placed great weight on the process of image-invention, preferring the appellation "concrete" over "abstract," believing that concrete art was conceived purely from the mind alone, rather than abstracted from something found in nature. Mondrian's Neoplasticism was known to the Asociación artists through the teachings of Joaquín Torres-García, who introduced Constructivist elements and European ideas of abstraction to South American avant-gardes upon his return to Montevideo in 1934. Taking from Torres-García the understanding of abstraction as ideology, the artists of the Asociación would, however, counter his theories of universal synthesis and symbolic imagery with a more stringent, purist aesthetic that favored what they felt to be the more immediate, unfiltered realities of non-objective art.

This will to non-objectivity was more than an aesthetic preference; for artists like Melé, the path to concrete art meant a violent rupture from everything belonging to the past and a freedom to invent, on a par with other international avant-garde movements, new objects that could serve the collective ethos of the time. Here, in his Pintura # 7 , the three rectangles of deep congruent color, contraposed against the more pointed rectilinearity of the white and black vertical and horizontal lines, strike a consonant balance against the dark ocher background. This formal equilibrium, created through clear structures of form and color placed in harmonious relation with each other, offers a pure conceptual space, unfettered by the historical past, for new invention. The underlying humanist impulse to shape this conceptual space for a new and better world was thoughtfully articulated by Melé, who remembered in retrospect, "I understood that art changed at the same rhythm as society, that it formed a new 'outline,' a new 'habitat' that transformed the human being not only in his way of feeling but also in his way of creating and interpreting the world that surrounded him."(2)

1) Arte Concreto-Invención, "Inventionist Manifesto," in Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection , New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001, p. 146.
2) G. Siracusano, Melé , Buenos Aires, Fundación Mundo Nuevo, 2005, p. 29.