César Paternosto

General comments
on exhibition.

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”. For over a decade, I limited my range of colours to yellow, red, white and black, a range of ancient lineage which Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, attributed to the Greeks and, although we know they used other pigments, Pliny is thought to be trying to establish a kind of metaphysical correlation between these “primary” colours and Aristotle’s four elements: earth, air, fire and water. If what interested me then was to underline the historic, symbolic resonance of this limited range of colour, over the past two years I have become receptive to other pigments, precisely to enlarge the register of linear relationships between the stripes —shades of ochre, dark red, blue— which demarcate the asymmetrical spaces in my paintings. César Paternosto

Cesar Paternosto
(Post) Deconstrucciones, 5, 2015
Oil and mixed media on canvas
65,00 x 65,00 cm

General comments on exhibition.

General comments
on exhibition.