César Paternosto - igallery

La Plata, Argentina (1931), lives and works in Segovia (España).

Biography

Around 2002 I began work on the series I called Marginalidad y desplazamientos [Marginality and displacements]: strips of black on a white background, my first works in this restricted range. The strips adhere to the perimeter of the canvas, but occasionally they split up, reappearing at the side of the canvas. Which, as one will observe, is a way to synthesize my long-standing aspiration for painting to be read in its entirety as an object. Over forty years ago, when I used to clear the surface to the forefront of a picture, I was forcing the viewer to look for “what is painted” only at the edges, that is to say the sides formed by the frame. Now there is a —minimal— frontal image but the viewer who can overcome the conventional habit of looking straight at the painting is rewarded by getting “more” from it: what is painted at the edges enlarges the image, completes it. It is what I call “the integral view of the painting”. Pliny the Elder maintained, in his Natural History, that the palette used by both Apelles and his contemporaries in classical Greece was restricted to four colours: white, black, red and yellow. But, as we know from archaeological evidence that the Greeks had other pigments at their disposal, one may think that Pliny was trying to establish a kind of metaphysical correlation between these “primary” colours and the four elements of Aristotle: earth, water, air and fire. This is what I am interested in underlining: the symbolic, historic resonance of this restricted range of colour. César Paternosto

Currículum PDF

Espacios asimétricos, 14, 2018
Oil on canvas
50,00 x 50,00 cm