English
Q.- Have you already had an exhibition titled “Saldos. Liquidación por Cambio de Ramo” (Leftover Stock. Liquidation for Change of Business) in the month of May this year, at the El Taller gallery?
A: It should have taken place but didn’t. In mutual agreement with the gallery, I suspended it because the strikes in Córdoba and Rosario intensified at that time. It wasn’t the time for “artistic festivals”. It’s quite likely that the same thing happens again this time.
Q.- Is it a retrospective show?
A.- Absolutely not. It is a show of paintings that are still in my possession. All the rest I sold, destroyed, disassembled (the most complicated ones) or they died (those that were the result of experimentation with materials), or I lost them. Like children, paintings have a life of their own. They, too, are fortuitous children of love or desire. Also, this is an exhibition of paintings only. I also made drawings, prints, or painting environments (by accumulation) and then the concave-plane mirrors.
Q.- Why have you stopped painting?
A.- It isn’t that I left painting aside, it’s painting that left me. When I stopped, I was passionately involved with it… You’ll see, I’ll explain the process. The theme of my work has been chaos because I felt that reality escaped from any prior concept of order I might have. I wanted to get to know its face and its secret laws, which meant negating all previously existing laws first. Sometimes I got it right and most times I got it wrong. The thing I was not mistaken about is my attitude towards art… My first attempt to materialize this chaos in an image was through painting, in an informal language, trying to retrieve forms from the patterns drawn in marble, as children do. My painting was very dark then and now it’s almost impossible to see. I used to use a medium that set color aglow, but later on, it shut it down altogether. Nevertheless, there are paintings from back then that still remain which I hold in high regard. One in particuar is “La pequeña historia de la incontinencia humana” (The Short History of Human Incontinence). Then, clarifying the forms a bit more, I did the “Serie Federal” (Federal Series), which was the most successful, but also the one that brought me to the brink of a sort of mannerism. I reacted just in time. I was selling a lot then and I feared turning into a manufacturer of decadent works, because when you imitate yourself the imitation gets increasingly worse, and by believing that you gain personality, you lose it entirely.
I became aware that the enveloping atmosphere of my works—focused on delineating a vital “elán” more than its protagonists—was constituting a way of outlining unity, and as such, it was capriciously giving order to the chaos that I purported to materialize in images. I then tried to highlight elements of tension, opposition and contrast. I painted three works that paved the way to a different attitude: “La última cena” (The Last Supper, Guido Di Tella collection), “Mambo” (which includes a stretcher facing frontward), “Amantes en acción” (Lovers in Action, painted on a canvas extended like a sheet over an iron bed, creating contrast between it and the lived experience of a relationship (this work is disassembled)) and “Nada es demasiado” (Nothing is Too Much, Hilario Lorenzutti collection), where the divided setup of “Mambo” is formulated as a fractured vision in a more categorical, but at the same time insolent, manner. Further development of that attitude then followed, putting “elements” in opposition to “atmosphere”, placing figures outside the natural frame, going out chaotically in all directions. Now, none of that seems chaotic any more.
Q.- And your Pop period?
A.- I never had a Pop period, as can be seen in this exhibition. When I began to make the paintings I have mentioned, no one was talking about Pop here or in Paris. The thing is that when people who knew no more about Pop than the word would see some real elements in the paintings, they called them Pop works. I think that in painting, it’s my best period. That’s when I was awarded the Premio Di Tella. It’s the period when Deira, Macció, de la Vega and I reciprocally encouraged one another. We needed that because we were embarked on an adventure that no one else shared with us at that time. Later, I continued with the accumulation of opposite paintings. I would continue onto the floor and ceiling until creating a completely out-of-control environment (Exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and in the Bonino gallery’s space in New York). Unable to store my works afterward, I would disassemble the paintings and I wound up destroying them because they had meaning while they were together, but not separately. On the other hand, if what I wanted was to envelop the viewer in an environment that he or she would be unable to dominate, I realized that I was failing by giving them my “I” as a point of reference, my painting and my anguish. Viewers would remain apart, contemplating how I was looking to position myself in opposition to my own self. As a result, I left painting and moved on to the concave-plane mirrors. Through them, I proposed to create environments of a different sort, which would also tend to surround the viewer with chaos. These mirrors break up and disperse the image without deforming it. I made an environment at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas. Once it was done, I was no longer interested in the problem. Doing the environment over again was a possibility, but it cost a lot of money only to have to destroy it. It served as decoration. If anyone had been willing… But it isn’t something I look for.
Q.- Do you think painting has died?
A.- No, it’s good therapy. I do believe that it is being questioned as a relevant language. It no longer serves to encompass an image of the present because it is a discontinuous vision. When I was painting I wanted to encompass that. It isn’t that I stopped believing in painting, but that I had stopped believing that it was the most adequate instrument for what I was proposing to do, and today, I no longer propose to do that. I’m not interested in representing life any more. To live it instead, is the way to present it and unleash possibilities. What I like the most about the painting we were doing at one time is the certainty that it provoked something culturally in our context. On the other hand, while I was painting, aside from it being very good therapy, I believed in it as a relevant language. Now, what constituted therapy for me was to stop painting, and to abandon the competitive art world along with it.
Q.- You aren’t going to paint any more?
A: I never say never, because if I did, I’m sure that at that very moment I would do whatever it was I said I wouldn’t do. Since it is good therapy and right now I don’t have any available to me, I just might do that, as a woman does embroidery, but what I would like to make perfectly clear is that it does not seem to me to be an ideal instrument for proposing new things at this time. It may not have been while I was painting, either. In five years, things have not changed all that much, but the important thing is that I used to believe differently about it.
Q: And why show these paintings?
A: Because I respect that period of mine very much and there are people who believe in and really love painting. These are the people with whom I have always debated and the people I have always cared about. Now I have some paintings left, a testimony to that passion. I have already destroyed too many things to destroy them, too.
Q: You talk about liquidation for change of business. What activity will you be going into? To be a barman, or to write?
A: No. The only one I have ever really had, to provoke and unleash. Now I will publish two books and the Bar Baro just recently opened at 872 Reconquista Street.
Q: Why open a bar?
A: Because given that I no longer make a living from art, I have to make a living in some way, and I like bars, but not the ones there are in Buenos Aires. It is certain that it is, in some sense, very small, a way of unleashing new forms of human relationships. Can I offer you a beer?
______________
(*) Luis Felipe Noé was born in Buenos Aires in 1933. His first exhibition was held at the Witcomb gallery ten years ago. He later held four more shows in Buenos Aires (Kalá and Van Riel -1960-, Bonino “Serie Federal” -1961-, Museo de Arte Moderno -1965-). He also held one in New York (Bonino 1966) and another in Caracas (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Sala de Espejos 1968).
He participated in the group that also included Deira, Macció and de la Vega, with whom he held nine exhibitions, including one at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Buenos AIres and the Comisión Nacional de Bellas Artes in Montevideo –both in 1963- and another at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro -1965-.
He participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Guggenheim International Award (1985). He obtained the following distinctions: Grant from the French Government (1961); Guggenheim Fellowship (1966-1967); Premio Nacional Di Tella (1963); Honorable Mention in the 6th International Biannial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo (1968). In 1963 he published a book titled “Antiestética” (Anti-Aesthetics, Van Riel, 1963). He will soon publish “El Arte entre la Tecnología y la Rebelión” (Art between Technology and Rebellion) and “Una Sociedad Colonial Avanzada” (An Advanced Colonial Society). He is currently a managing partner of a bar, “Bar Baro”, at 872 Reconquista Street. He was previously a law student, journalist, movie theater inspector and the Director of a cultural center in a Puerto-Rican neighborhood in New York. He lived in Paris for one year and in New York for four years.