textos de Pablo Menicucci III

Menicucci

Glamorous pop

Pablo Menicucci was born in Mar del Plata, a coastal city with pop features  typical of the world of publicity, showbiz, the star system and the idleness associated with summer resorts. Even though he always painted and drew with passion, Menicucci never followed a regular course. His first teacher was the master painter Juan Carlos Castagnino. Menicucci’s father was the manager of a hostel in nearby Mar Chiquita. Aware of his son’s passion for drawing, he asked Castagnino to take his son in as a student. It was from Castagnino that Menicucci would learn everything  about art production, and set out to put it into practice. He would wake up in the morning to make pencil drawings, in silence. Then he would have lunch and take a rest almost without speaking, until the time came to resume his work. In the afternoon he turned to color and ink. His love for manual work dates back to those days.

Menicucci then went on to study with Policastro, a meticulous color artist with a rich palette and a most refined taste. Policastro made him love and discover landscape in all its variables. With every brushstroke on the canvas, he would recover different shades of color from a poetic vision of the surroundings. This knowledge allowed him to catch the predominant color of the city where he used to live and to use those shades of color to build an image in which the landscape itself had never been present.

Finally, in the 1960s the School of Visual Arts was opened at the Mar del Plata Club Building. It was razed by fire the following year. From those days, Menicucci recalls his close relationship with friends and colleagues with whom he dared to break certain aesthetic barriers.

In 1964 he traveled to Europe for the first time. At Venice´s Biennial he stumbled upon a stand that was far from ordinary; mostly, it dealt with informalism. Menicucci was completely overwhelmed by the vitality of this form of pop art. It was the pop aesthetics of the US stand: Rauschemberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine. These two confronted positions inspired him to become an artist. He was taken over by the freedom expressed by those simple paintings which had nothing to conceal. It was painting and it was figurative art, full of minute details that captured the sign of the times like no other medium did.

II

By 1967 Menicucci was already a mature artist.  The previous year, he graduated with flying colors from the School of Visual Arts.  Together with friends from Mar del Plata, he was invited to exhibit at Galería Lirolay in Buenos Aires.

Menicucci was the first artist to exhibit at Galería del Mar, a legendary avant garde  venue in Mar del Plata. This is where he put together the first art “happening” in that city. Fruits, toys, vegetables and  buckets of paint were on display for viewers to eat or consume otherwise. All the while, some of his friends, standing on a bridge, listened to music in a relaxed atmosphere. But visitors chose to use the space in quite an unexpected way, playing with food and paint. The gallery became a party of confusing runs. Two high-ranking members of the Navy Base who happened to be there were splashed over with orange-colored tempera. As a result, the artists were taken to the police station for questioning. Luckily for them, this was before the bloody military dictatorship of 1976-83, known as the “Proceso.” the artists were just asked, “What were you guys trying to do?”. The incident made headlines in the local newspapers, and the artists felt they had to  apologize publicly.

The art critic Jorge Romero Brest was on summer holidays in Mar del Plata. He invited Menicucci and his friends to visit him at his beach tent at the Yatching Club. They were all asked to define some key concepts of art.

Romero Brest then invited them to the prestigious Ver y Estimar prize at the Foundation he headed at the time. Menicucci submitted a beautiful work which contained the idea of object - a three-dimension glass case. His work made an impact but received no distinction. The same year, he decided to enter the Braque Prize. His entry, entitled ¡Hola Sophia!, was a tribute to his favorite diva, Sophia Loren. It was his mother who had taught him to love Loren, with whom she identified  because they were both southern Italian girls.  In a rented apartment he shared with his friends, Menicucci finished the parallelepipe, the eyes, the mouth, and the daises in a fortnight. The work, which later would go on to be hailed as a masterpiece, was carefully wrapped. Together with Mercedes Esteves, Menicucci boarded a  train to Buenos Aires, where they set up the work at a corner of the third floor of the Centro Cultural San Martín, at the time the only see of the Modern Art Museum. The work made an impact, earning Menicucci the prize for under 35s. At age 33 - “already old,“- as he used to say - he traveled to Paris, where he would live for more than a year. The students’ uprisings of May 68 caught him by surprise but provided him with a unique opportunity to appreciate the value of ideology and the commitment demonstrated by the young protesters.

III

Menicucci’s work with volume strengthened his artistry and craftmanship. But these pieces, like the ones by Wessselman or Dine in those days, consisted  of a wood frame and a cardboard canvas, a sophisticated surface which called for frontal depiction. Divas were one of the main topics of pop art in those days. Portrayed in the same pose they appeared in magazines, these divas came to epitomize glamour and, in many cases, tragedy.. Menicucci`s Sophia was a diva who had overcome the tragic fate of North American women. For she was a refined Latin woman  who had left behind her origins as a poor girl from southern Italy. Her smile and her demeanor, which only an Italian woman could have achieved, became the stereotype of glamorous sensuality, mostly through her voluptuous mouth. With red lipstick on, Loren’s mouth possessed a classical beauty in Menicucci’s drawing, as a cult object, a fetish. Menicucci would always paint Loren’s mouth as an eternal homage to the screen diva. Menicucci’s use of a real object and ready made techniques modified yet respected the boundaries between camp and fetish.

Menicucci recovered the mannequins discarded by Los Gallegos department store  and transformed them into mariner ladies, retro ladies, and musical comedy girls, beautiful and charming yet distant.

Furniture pieces, bottles and trinkets were also used with diaphanous hues. “My wish is to create a work that keeps the fluency of a conversation or a game. It is through them that I position  myself on the antipodes of synthesis, because what I try to say is that ,luckily, life is generous, rich and varied”, Menicucci was quoted as saying at  that time.

Like other artists, Menicucci too fell under the spell of souvenirs and two pesos trinkets bought at dime stores. He collected countless small boxes of souvenirs from in different trips. Some were small sculptures made of good quality plastic; some others were small animals from Africa, or dolls and little ladies dressed in romantic gowns, full of small pleats and ribbons. These were objects collected by a flaneur  who traveled the world observing everything with delight, stopping to acknowledge the effort embodied by those representations. Indeed, Menicucci will go on at large about them,. Explaining that each one comes from a different place. he will bring back geographical memories, will show childish surprise because he refuses to acknowledge these are mass production items. He chooses, instead, to

 regard them as unique pieces.

IV

I have heard Menicucci speak about a type of sexuality that reflects our time. It is an androgenic sensuality, deprived and disturbing, with a faded splendor. His retro divas rest in pastel colors, their eyes hardly visible, almost without eyebrows, their heads wrapped in capelins and hats. Their eyes staring ahead, or lost in the distance, alone or accompanied, these elegant ladies are ubiquitous in Menicucci’s work.They are survivors of an eternal type of woman, distinguished, with harmonious slenderness, distant, like memories of  times gone by. In a way, they make a sharp contrast with Menicucci’s caritas, a series in which the artists leaves ladies aside as the object of portraiture..

They are made of cutout frames, or painted on canvas on slightly textured backgrounds, vibrating with color. There is an adolescent air to the sittees. They are full of determination and, intelligent; their mouths are delicate, well drawn, describing their dispassionate, cold attitude.

The stroke of the paint brush leaves slightly recognizable marks on a surface, and also a delicate touch of subtle hues. Although the canvas has a fine coating of paint, it is always loaded with enough paint brush strokes to give that color to the surface. Before, the surface was plane, but now Menicucci feels that he cannot see the cutout on the plane surface. This type of work, Menicucci muses, was done in a different context, with a different kind of energy. The images, for all their power,  maintain the tendency to glamour and showbiz glitter that so characterizes magazine portraiture. The subjects, however, are no longer recognizable: they are anonymous, as the artists have ceased to pay tribute to their screen idols. Their fetish objects, these days, are a whole lot of objects exhibited in small glass cases, and tell no story.at all.

In this new collection of more recent masterpieces, Menicucci uses the resources already evident in the early phase of his career. These resources are now used with the awareness he acquired after so many years. Being witness to so much decadence - mostly in the last years - in Mar del Plata was no easy thing for Menicucci. Gone is the glamorous splendor of yore. Opportunities are more scarce for everyone, even for experienced artists. But Menicucci’s loyalty to pop art remains intact. Castagnino was the bridge to contemporary aesthetics in Mar del Plata, embracing abstraction in his last phase. He was a witness to his time, and transformed the epic nature of our identity into a stereotype. Pablo Menicucci could well be the one man from Mar del Plata to inaugurate a contemporary art phase, circling inside and outside the city. Menicucci, indeed, does not shun the use of space, the appropriation of objects, the performance techniques. Even today, some of his innovative proposals of the 60s and 70s are hardly known in Mar del Plata.

Our relationship started some years ago, when I began to write and Menicucci told me his stories punctuated by emphatical gestures.This is why I wanted to help him recover the visibility of his legendary work, lost in an incident during the last military dictatorship.

Delegation isn’t something Menicucci will readily go for. Instead, he always chooses to update a new version of his own self. This fact moved me as much as his new vision of Sophia Loren. Now, she is a beautiful, mature woman who no longer smiles with her eyes.