Exhibition catalogue Cesar Paternosto

Author: Cesar Paternosto

60 pages. 16.8 x 23 cm (width x height)

Spanish edition with appendix of texts in English

Paperback

ISBN: 9788417173098

Paternosto easily unfolds himself as creator and curator, creator and theorist, with an enormous analytical and didactic capacity to explain his painting and through it the entire history of art. In his brilliant text in this catalogue he shows us how, in the Western tradition (and even Cubism itself), the pictorial field was organized according to a centripetal principle, of gravitation towards the center, which Rudolf Arnheim studied in his book The Power of the Center (1982). Against this traditional tendency, Piet Mondrian imposed compositional dispersion in his mature work, gently centrifuging the pictorial elements towards the periphery of the painting. Paternosto's radical invention when in 1969 he abandoned the front surface of his canvases to paint on the sides of the frame is not only an iconoclastic gesture, but a logical corollary of Mondrian's precedent. Paternosto combines Mondrian's compositional dispersion with the twentieth-century awareness of the objectuality of painting. A surprising consequence of his invention is that painting is no longer offered to the eye, but is hidden and the viewer, as Paternosto says, has to go looking for it by approaching it obliquely. But Paternosto has gone beyond this emphasis on what he calls the objectuality of painting. In his now classic study L'instauration du tableau: métapeinture á l'aube des temps modernes (1993), Victor Stoichita showed us how, by depicting windows, doors, niches, mirrors and paintings in his paintings, the Baroque painter brought to light the artificial and fictitious character of the image. Stoichita's book was translated into English with a very apt title, The Self-Aware Image. It could be adapted to this beautiful and intelligent exhibition by Paternosto and called The Self-Aware Object. Much has been said about the self-referential nature of abstract painting; here we are dealing with something more; it is about the painting as a self-conscious object. Paternosto's pieces possess the supreme virtue of presenting themselves, even without the help of their creator; they themselves explain to us what kind of objects they are, where they come from, who their ancestors are © Pablo, José Victoriano, Piet, Joaquín – and what options govern this fascinating and inexhaustible game of painting.