Alfredo Cernadas

For the Herald

En “Irrupción de la Memoria, el Confín” de Mariana San Juan, nacida
y criada en Tierra del Fuego, todos los colores que encontrarán serán blancos, grises y negros. Los utiliza en los paisajes inhóspitos, trágicamente imponentes, azotados por el viento y desérticos de nuestras frías planicies y glaciares sureños. Estos impresionantes conjuntos
de rocas irregulares contra los cuales chocan las aguas congeladas
son verdaderamente majestuosos, de una grandeza Wagneriana. El efecto general es de una soledad abrumadora y dramática.

By Alfredo Cernadas

For the Herald

Artists, besides plying their trade, often earn their keep teaching their art to other people, among other activities. Somehow, many of those pupils, mostly painters, wind up painting in a way amazingly similar to that of their teachers. It has often been the case that, when I attended so-and-so’s exhibition, I guessed who this artist’s teacher was and it turned out that I was right. Well, this certainly did not happen when I saw the works by the three artists who are now exhibiting in the Recoleta Cultural Centre: Patricia Mastronardi, Mabel Ruggiero and Mariana San Juan. All they have in common is that they are former pupils of Diana Dowek, an artist who, although she has a strong artistic personality, did not leave her stylistic imprint on her students.

Patricia Mastronardi’s forte evidently is the human body, which she has portrayed in a series of fragments in the appropriately called series Fragmented Bodies. These fragments belong to a beautifully drawn, vigorous body, carefully painted in a sober, limited palette of strongly contrasting hues. The overall effect is srongly sensuous. In the Tierra del Fuego born and raised Mariana San Juan’s Memory’s Irruption and the Confine, all the colours you will find are white, grey and black. She uses them on barren, tragically impressive windswept and deserted landscapes of our cold Southern plains and glaciers. These impressive ensembles of jagged rocks against which freezing waters crash are of truly majestic, Wagnerian grandeur. The overall effect is of overwhelming, dramatic solitude.

These works could not be more different than Mabel Ruggiero’s silent, sad but very beautifully drawn structures of buildings on the make, “progress” in progress. In Delicate Balance she shows us small humans silently, anonymously, doing their job on iron beams that have no beginning and no end. The men are as faceless and anonymous as their jobs. They indifferently, silently defy the dizzying heights in sombre, grey surroundings that seem set in the middle of grey volcano dust clouds. The only touches of colour can be seen in some of the lonesome worker’s outfits. They are on their own, they do not communicate in this forlorn, cold world for the sale of an endless future.