Further Resources

Clorindo Testa: Between Visual Arts and Architecture

The Faculty of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires offered ornato courses until the mid-1950s, in which students were taught to draw with pencil and charcoal from classical plaster models. People with pictorial talent would often begin their studies looking to achieve a career. This situation changed radically with the university reform of 1958, after which student projects were required to have a functionalist rigor, especially in classes such as those of architect Vladimir Acosta. Only many years later did the school implement a more pluralistic program.

The life and work of Clorindo Testa (Napoli, 1923 - Buenos Aires, 2013) can be understood within this context. He studied at this university during the previous decade, and, after returning from a three years trip to Europe, began his career as architect in the early 1950's. In parallel, he was also making artistic works, and showing at galleries in Buenos Aires.

Testa is the phenomenon that proves that it is possible to merge the fields of architecture and visual arts. One cannot look at the side walls of the Bank of London without immediately recognizing how they exceed functionality and create an expressive and artistic atmosphere. In his work, painting, sculpture and architecture come together and the boundaries between each discipline are blurred. Testa has constructed his own personal approach to architecture, one that is marked both by risk and the importance of thinking freely.

With a series of grey and black works in the 1960s, Testa began his painting in the tradition of the informalism. The works documented in this exhibition emphasize his later works from recent years, where the origin of his creativity no longer emerges from abstraction, but rather from the language of architecture, and from the sensitive functionality of spray paint, collage, and other techniques.

These works foreground the architectural, and I would argue enables him to arrive at a completely personal form of expression that is heretofore unprecedented in Argentine art. Few architects have produced an entirely personal and creative sensibility in their pictorial work. Recent art history offers us a few examples: Le Corbusier with his interest in "Orphism", and Aldo Rossi with his watercolors and tapestries. Testa is uncommon in the contemporary period in this regard.

This exhibition highlights the liaison Testa constructed between visual arts and architecture, albeit in a conceptual manner that incorporates graphic and audiovisual means and builds upon the theoretical dimension inherent in Testa's work.

Interestingly, Clorindo Testa's oeuvre does not seem to belong to the world of academic painting, or modern or avant-garde artistic practice. In this regard, it is a sort of bypass in which his deep knowledge of space and architecture mix, enabling us to look at the world in a different way.