Contact: Antonio Asis, Martha Boto, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Hugo de Marziani, Gregorio Vardanega

Sicardi Gallery presents Contact: Antonio Asis, Martha Boto, Horacio García Rossi, Hugo de Marziani, Gregorio Vardanega. On view July 14-August 29. Opening Reception Tuesday, July 14, 6pm-8pm.

Antonio Asis began studying art at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes when he was 14. Subsequently, at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón, he studied composition with Héctor Cartier, who encouraged the young artist to explore the many diverse applications of the principles of design and composition.

The class was influential for Asis, as were the after-class conversations with his classmates, which continued at the Bar Splendid, a local café at the intersection of Ayacucho and la Avenida Las Heras in Buenos Aires. Throughout the 1940s, Asis explored abstraction and non-representational art; with the publication of Arturo magazine in 1944, and the creation of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, Buenos Aires was an important site for the development of post-war abstraction.

In the spring of 1956, Asis moved to Paris, like many of his colleagues and friends, where he quickly became part of an international circuit of kinetic artists; among others, he befriended Yaacob Agam, Nicolas Schöffer, Jesús-Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely, and Victor Vasarely. Surrounded by this dynamic milieu, he began a series of work in which he considered how the phenomena of light could be mediated through photography. Shortly afterward, he began to study vibrations between colors and the many possibilities within monochromatic compositions.

Like many of his rioplatense colleagues, Asis was deeply influenced by the ideas of Max Bill and Georges Vantongerloo, important artists and theorists of European abstraction. In 1971, Asis co-founded an artist group, Position, which included Carlos Agüero, Armando Durante, Hugo Demarco, and Horacio García Rossi, all Argentine artists living in Paris, and all interested in movement and the vibrations of light.

Antonio Asis lives and works in Paris, France.

Martha Boto was born December 27, 1925 in Buenos-Aires, Argentina. In the Thirties, she and her partner Gregorio Vardanega, an artist of Italian origin, were active participants in the lively artistic atmosphere of the era. The period was typified by forays into various schools and styles, from impressionist to expressionist painting, surrealism to abstraction, all of which led eventually to optical and kinetic art. Having been the first in Argentina to create a work of art that involved movement, Vardanega and Boto chose to move to France in 1959 to further their artistic pursuits.

During this time both artists were constructing Plexiglas works, most often mobiles suspended in space, and Boto would soon play a key role in the evolution of optical and kinetic art. In 1961 she presented her works at the Galerie Denise René in an exhibit entitled Art Abstrait Constructif International. Focussing her work around the concepts of movement, illumination, and color, Boto explored the potential of materials that could modify, absorb, and reflect light, i.e. Plexiglas, aluminum, or stainless steel. In 1964 she approached upon an even more articulated aesthetic utilizing electric mechanisms and projected light on objects in movement. Such is how the first kinetic-light boxes were born.

Mirrors, multiangular surfaces, or reflective metal play a fundamental role in the ability of the artist to distort space and to transform the appearance of each normal object in order to create undefined depth. In the same year, Boto exhibited works at La Maison des Beaux-Arts in Paris and once more at the Galerie Denise René nel 1969. Throughout the course of the Nineties her works were exhibited in France at l’Espace Bateau Lavoir (1993), la Galerie Argentine (1996) and the Saint-Lambert Post Office (1997).

Martha Boto died in Paris October 13, 2004. In 2006, the Sicardi Gallery of Houston dedicated an exhibit both to Boto and Gregorio Vardanega, entitled Contact. Le cyber Cosmos de Boto et Vardanega.

Horacio Garcia-Rossi was a visual artist, born in 1929 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and died 5 September 2012 in Paris at the age of 83 years.

Gregorio Vardanega (21 March 1923, Possagno – 7 October 2007, Paris) was an artist of Italian origins who worked in Argentina and France. Vardanega and Martha Boto (fr), his companion, created the term “chromocinetism” to describe their artistic research.

Vardanega’s family migrated to Argentina when he was three years old. He attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires from 1939 to 1946. He won gold medals at the Exposition of Visual Art in Argentina and at the International and Universal Exposition in Brussels in 1958. Vardanega lived in France from 1959 till his death in 2007.

In 1946 Vardanega began working in acrylic glass, and also produced structures using overlapping wires.[2] Through the 1950s he experimented with kinetic art, constructing artworks moving and rotating at irregular intervals, which produced abstract patterns through lighting, reflections and shadows.

His first kinetic piece using an electric motor was exhibited in the gallery of the Estimulo de Bellas Artes in October 1957. In 1959 Vardanega moved to Paris, where he met the Argentinian artist Martha Boto.

They maintained contact with artists in Buenos Aires, including Eduardo Jonquières and his group “Arte Nuevo”, and the artists’ group MADI. He was represented by Galerie Denise René. Vardanega had his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1964, which established him as an important practitioner of kinetic art.

Above image: Gregorio Vardanega, Tour Orthogonale, 1987. Aluminum, Plexiglas, motor, 74 x 32 2/8 x 32 2/8 in.

Below images: Antonio Asis, Esquisse, 1954. Graphite on paper, 7 3/8 in. x 4 5/8 in.; Martha Boto, Déplacements Optico-Hydraliques, 1970. Aluminum, colored Plexiglas, motor, plywood, 51 1/4 in. x 40 in. x 11 1/2 in.; Hugo de Marziani, Untitled, 1960. Tempera on paper, 7.9 in. x 5.5 in.