Critics
A VISION OF AMERICA
Hugo Balmaceda was born in Frías, Santiago del Estero (1937).
In Buenos Aires, he does his artistic formation in the time of the student reform in the National Schools of Fine Arts (1955).
He belongs, because of his generation inscription, to a plastic history whose policy is structured out of the artistic engagements of salons and competitions. A decade will pass until he defines his individual work without apostatising his artistic objectives. Later on, he will project these into teaching, in the place chosen as his residence, in the city of Adrogué, province of Buenos Aires, where he will constitute a studio for children and adults. There he makes his plastic and pedagogical labour in the public sphere; his wife Ernestina Arizio and the artist Raquel Goya will accompany him in this cultural enterprise.
In the 80s, his pictorial work is intensified and the examination of our American cultures becomes systematic. He studies the 'Cerro Colorado' caves in the Córdoba province, whose archaeological work is made by the Argentinean anthropologist Alberto Rex González and he investigates the 'chaco-santiagueña' culture discovered by the Wagner brothers. This meeting with his origins is going to outline his future work.
Documental scientific investigations will bring interesting facts to his painting. We can see this production reflected in the last works that refer to the Latin-American problem. The Torres García school and the 'rioplatense' culture will constitute another nucleus that will bring to his work the constructive basis. The syncretism between the river culture and the 'santiagueña' land will be evident in his plastic language that we will try to analyse here.
Frontal and orthogonal law will be some of the composing constants of his work. César A. Fioravanti, director of the Luis Perlotti museum, says when referring to his work: 'Hugo Balmaceda belongs to this Race of Noble Archetypes, who knows how to express himself through a magnificent blending and lean colour painting'.
'Coming from a figuration representative of human pain, he kept bright an art with hope and today, maturing in the conscious and reflexive work, knows which is his mission'. In these words we understand not only the vanguards proposal of the so-called utopias, but also the constant reference to an art that was unknown in the classrooms of our country and which constitute the origins of our Latin American culture.
Founder of the Latin-American Culture Association 'La Joaquina', in the city of Adrogué, he made his the supporting principles of an art that would express this reality. His current works are made on cloth supports; in some cases with pottery inclusion in a chromatic tonic of restrained palette. Without orthodoxies, the breaking of the right angle proposes him in winding curve lines; a counterpoint to the idea of horizontality and verticality, specially the dancing and creation series.
The figuration resolved as sign is supported in a matter worked with impastos and textures. Directional indications in the form of arrows indicate an ascension movement. There are lengthened totem figures, whose structures allude to a cosmogony. Closer to Gambartes and the 'litoral' group because of the colour and treatment of the material, these expressions put us closer to a world of magic beliefs that were later transcultured in Christian symbols.
These works that comprise the last years of his painting have a greater enrichment as regards his cosmo positive and chromatic vision. A return to the figuration in a context of signs and symbols created in the development of his creative process is visualised. An exhaustive study, that exceeds this critic preface could seize to an interpretative close up to these iconographies.
Rosa Faccaro
Memeber of the Argentinean Association of Art Critics, AAAC
and the International association of Art Critics, IAAC.
WHEN GOD MIXED MUD
When God mixed mud -with which then he made the man- he got two pieces from the bun. One, kept the warm of his hand; the other, got cold on the table.
From this last one, he made the calculating, neglectful, hypocrites, interested bastards that speculate and flourish with human sorrow, who he lets them fall in hell to redeem all their wrongs.
With the first one he modelled Eve and Adam to place on Earth the Full Man with his virtues and little faults. Those that love the other sacrifice hours of their personal existence to give it to their fellows, to better and dignify them. Those that assume a life in retreat because they believe in the value of silence and break into pieces their bread to share it in poverty. Those that fight everyday to be less forgotten in this pitiless world.
Hugo Balmaceda belongs to this Race of Noble Archetypes, who knows how to express himself through a magnificent blending and lean colour painting. Coming from a figuration representative of human pain, he kept bright an art with hope and today, maturing in the conscious and reflexive work, knows which is his mission.
America was always his source of inspiration, which with a dense synthesis power, in these works a tradition that seemed to us lost reappears. The studious does not remain with the little book that is given to him as a gift; Hugo dives in the legends and images of his 'Lulescos', 'Vilelas' and 'Tonocoteses' ancestors; disappeared cultures thanks to the so-called 'Western and Christian' civilisation.
He, assumed, as a forced blood mix, finds in the broad lines of rigid planes the powered expression of that telluric aesthetics. A sewing, that joins plane with plane, remembers that rush-matting leather were witnesses of magic rites where water blessing was implored under the pleas to the God of the Sun.
Black smoke, white chalk and the ochre of the earth, are the dominants of a rich polychrome palette that those primitives did not have at their hands. BALMACEDA helps us with his symbolic and purified plastic to understand that inner force that day by day accedes with more power from the same entrails of the "Pachamama" that saw him being born.
Cesar Ariel Fioravanti
ENIGMATIC CHARACTERS
Hugo Balmaceda based on American legends and myths, presents a series of Enigmatic Characters, a production of the last years. He leaves aside the "santiagueños" myths and returns again to the sources where the myth springs up with universal cosmic force. This cosmogony based on all the nature's telluric force is made evident in all the zones referred as residencies of the sacred. With the visual field divided, heaven occupies a predominant place and the earth acquires another symbolic dimension. The structures that frame the geometric figuration, are sensitised by the treatment of the matter that covers an important scope of the pictorial composition. The figurative abstraction acquires a bigger interpretative synthesis; the artist emphasising the kind of magic atmosphere. Chromaticism becomes more vibrating, announcing the luminosity of certain figures that appear in the skies announcing determined conjunctions in mysterious imaginary constellations.
ROSA FACCARO
from the Argentinean and International Association of Art Critics