lunes, 28 de noviembre de 2011
bio de Pablo
Datos
biográficos - Pablo Menicucci
Pablo
Menicucci nació en Mar del Plata en
1933.
De 1960 a 1966 estudia Artes Visuales recibiéndose de Profesor Nacional
en la Escuela Martín Malharro de Mar del Plata.
En 1967
gana una beca a París otorgada por la Embajada de Francia.
Entre 1961
y 1987 realizó quince viajes al exterior estudiando y trabajando en Bélgica,
Brasil, Estados Unidos, Grecia, Dinamarca, España, Francia, Holanda,
Inglaterra, Italia, Portugal y Suiza.
Exposiciones
individuales
1967/72
Galería Lirolay, Buenos Aires
1967/69/74/76/77/78/79/80/81
Galería del Mar, Mar del Plata
1969/71
Galería Arte Nuevo, Buenos Aires
1973
Galería Rubbers, BuenosAires
1974/75/77/80
Galería Bonino, Buenos Aires
1977
Centro Cultural Argentino, París
1983/84
Galería Centoria, Buenos Aires
1984
Retrospectiva Museo Castagnino, Mar del Plata
1988
Galería Vemeer, Buenos Aires
1994
Galería De Santi, Buenos Aires
1998
Menicucci, 30 años, Museo Castagnino, Mar del Plata
1999
Centro Cultural Auditórium, Mar del Plata
1999
Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires
2005
Menicucci. Pop glamoroso, Fondo
Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires
2007
Menicucci. Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires
Exposiciones
colectivas
1967
Ver y Estimar, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos
Aires
Premio Georges Braque,
Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires
Arte de Avanzada en la
Argentina, Roland Lambert Gallery
1968 Grands et Jenues d´aujurd´hui´,
Museo
de Arte Moderno, París
Exposition
des artistes boursiers du gouvernement francais,
Centre Universitaire, París
1969
Experiencias´69, Instituto
Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires
1972
Rassegna San Fedele, Centro Cultural
Milano
1973
Pequeño formato, Muestra Itinerante por América Latina
1974
Pintura argentina, Galería
Rubbers, Buenos Aires
1979
Homenaje a Julio Verne, Museo de Arte
Moderno, Buenos Aires
Premio Encotel,
Palacio de Correos, Buenos Aires
1980
Premio internacional de dibujo,
Centro
Juan Miró, Barcelona
Museo
de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid
Retrospectiva de artistas
ganadores del Premio Braque,
Museo
de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires
1981
Bienal del dibujo, Museo
Castagnino, Mar del Plata
1982
Certamen Pintura, Fundación
Gutemberg, Buenos Aires
1983
Jornadas de la crítica, Galería Arte
Nuevo, Buenos Aires
Artistas tiempo libre,
Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires
Homenaje a la democracia
(surrealismo),
Galería
Centoia, Buenos Aires
Premio Benson & Hedges de
murales,
Centro
Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires
1984
El juguete, Museo Castagnino, Mar del Plata
Artistas generación intermedia,
Museo
Castagnino, Mar del Plata
Artistas en papel,
Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires
Libro de artistas,
Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires
1989
Semana de la crítica internacional,
Galería
Van Riel, Buenos Aires
1992
Los juegos de los artistas, Museo Castagnino, Mar del Plata
1993
Homenaje a Piazzolla, Galería de
Santi, Buenos Aires
1994
Ver y Estimar (antes del Di Tella),
Museo
Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
2001
Bocas
Centro
Cultural Borges. Buenos Aires
2004
Objeto y representación
Museo
Juan C. Castagnino, Mar del Plata
2005
Arte Forum
Villa
Victoria Ocampo. Mar del Plata
Premios
Obtenidos
1967
Premio Georges Braque, beca a París
por un año
1972
Premio Martín Malharro del Salón Manuel Belgrano,
Museo
Sívori
1972
Suplente Beca a Italia, Fondo Nacional
de las Artes
1972
Primer Premio Salón Municipal, Mar del Plata
1973
Primer premio en orden provincial y segundo en orden nacional Artistas visuales
del interior,
Museo
de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires
1976
Finalista Premio J. Payró
1979 Primer premio concurso Encotel, Año internacional del Niño y la
Familia
Emisión
del sello postal con la obra premiada
1981
Primer premio Salón Provincial, Buenos Aires
1982
Primer premio Bienal de Dibujo, Mar del Plata
1983
Mención concurso de murales Benson & Hedges
1983
Primer premio Pintura, Centro Gallego
Mar del Plata
(Jurados:
Jorge Glusberg y Wolf Vostell)
1983
Primer premio Bienal Museo Castagnino, Mar del
Plata
Se
encuentran obras suyas en museos e importantes colecciones privadas de
Argentina, Brasil, Venezuela, Estados Unidos, Austria, Francia, Holanda, Italia
e Inglaterra.
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.
textos Pablo Menicucci II
Menicucci 30 años
Una mirada cándida
Si algo resalta en
esta retrospectiva es una especie de inocencia, de candor por cosas que
emocionan desde su simplicidad. Una mirada de niño que puede percibir todos los
detalles de algo que lo conmueve. Sin embargo se trata más bien de un testigo
de una inocencia perdida en los años 40 - recuérdese que una de las estrellas
arquetípicas del cine de esa época era “la ingenua”, la mujer capaz de mostrar
las medias que cubren sus torneadas piernas sin erotismo, con una sensualidad
primitiva, gráfica-.
Testigo privilegiado
que miró el Mayo Francés sin entender demasiado, ajeno en su idilio por la
Europa que conoció en tantos viajes, a la protesta, la rebelión, las
ideologías.
Su obra no contiene
elementos contestatarios, invita a creer en corazones simples, llenos de amor.
Nadie puede dudar que
Menicucci introduce en Mar del Plata los elementos del Pop y que es en los
finales de los 60 un personaje clave, capaz de conquistar a los teóricos como
Romero Brest por su imagen, capaz de saltar hacia Buenos Aires con la fuerza de
su candor con su obra embalada en un tren para ganar el Premio Bracque. Capaz
de movilizar con un happening una ciudad provinciana.
El Pop no es un
invento norteamericano propiamente dicho. Nace incipiente en Inglaterra en 1954
con una exposición titulada “Esto es Mañana” donde un artista como Richard
Hamilton presenta un collage en el cual un hombre musculoso en una típica pose
de fisicoculturista, sostiene un chupetín gigante con la palabra POP en grandes
letras. El propio Hamilton enuncia en 1957 que las cualidades que estaba
buscando en su pintura eran: “popularidad, transitoriedad, desechabilidad,
ingenio, sensualidad, artimañas y atractivos”.
Evoluciona en Londres
a través de jóvenes estudiantes de las escuelas de arte e introduce el uso del
assemblage – al decir de Lucie Smith: yuxtaposiciones de objetos preexistentes,
donde la contribución del artista habría de encontrarse más en establecer
conexiones entre objetos, que en hacer nuevos objetos-. El assemblage permite
también la incorporación al medio ambiente, por medio de formatos diversos de
la planimetría de la pintura tradicional; y al happening, categoría del arte
que implica la participación en actos del espectador-.
El punto clave para
comprenderlo es la cultura urbana de Londres y Norteamérica en los años de
posguerra. El comic, los disturbios raciales y la silla eléctrica, las
repeticiones de mitos del cine, la cultura publicitaria de los anuncios, las
insidiosas repeticiones del horror de la televisión en plena expansión en Nueva
York. También la figura del artista, cuya personalidad trasciende incluso a su
obra, sino es tal vez “la obra” propiamente dicha.
En la recorrida de
las salas de esta muestra, notamos que faltan algunos elementos de su obra que
hubieran sido bienvenidos. Algunos de sus paralelepípedos de las primeras
épocas, o de sus maniquíes comprados en Los Gallegos y transformados con
maquillaje a su estilo, pestañas postizas pintadas incluidas. Obras que según
Pablo se han perdido por allí, o están en colecciones particulares.
Se reconocen, sin
embargo, tres tendencias básicas.
Una genuinamente Pop,
que implica sus primeras obras, donde construye con volumen, utilizando los
mitos del cine. Pinturas que tratan las variaciones de la forma con tintas
planas, de contornos nítidos. Tendencia que evoluciona hacia las imágenes casi
gráficas, llenas de candor de las revistas de labores francesas o de cantantes
populares- maravillosos ejemplos entre los que se cuentan “El cantor desconocido”,
“Modes et Travaux” y “Gomina”-. Allí aparecen los elementos lineales que con
segmentos en escala con su correspondiente sombra producen un ritmo, descolocan
el sentido de planimetría del fondo dándole aire y liviandad a los tonos
apagados.
Otra, de una
geometría sensible, pulcra, perfeccionista. Sutil en la utilización del color.
Y finalmente, una
surrealista, pero con caracterizado sentido metafísico. La inmanencia de los
volúmenes geométricos, de las acuarelas como “La luna” que se encuentran en la planta
baja.
La serie de los gatos
se inscribe en las dos primeras líneas, pues combina un detalle perfeccionista,
regodeo de técnica sensualista en la captación de cada uno de los pormenores
del brillo de la mirada o las variaciones del pelo. Serie que evoluciona hacia
un acompañamiento de los gatos con otros elementos descontextualizados, como
cartas, sobres, vistas de ciudades.
La confluencia
también se expresa en obras en las que aparecen homenajes a Bracque, aires a
Modigliani –ojos sin órbita, cuellos alargados, como en “Melancólico poema
provinciano”-. Las formas se encuentran integradas por la simplicidad de estar
cerca, por el color, por el sólo interés por el que fueron agrupadas.
Hay una obra que se
evade, tendencia sin continuidad que contiene elementos gestuales en aparente
desorden que es “Sofia”, donde el color tiene una fuerza expresiva potente,
donde hay superposiciones y contrastes como no se ven con frecuencia en su
obra.
Merecida
retrospectiva, que permite evaluar el contenido de una evolución que esperamos
no se detenga.
Pilar Altilio
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