MADRID.- Towards Painting as Object, presented by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, establishes a dialogue between paintings by the Argentinean artist César Paternosto and works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections. Curated by Paternosto himself, the exhibition analyses the shift in the pictorial paradigm which, at the start of the 20th century, led artists to rediscover the painting as object, in contrast to the Renaissance illusionism that had transformed the canvas into a window through which to see visible reality. The exhibition thus juxtaposes eight works by Paternosto loaned from various public and private collections with six paintings from the museum’s collections - by Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Joaquín Torres-García - with the aim of encouraging visitors to reflect on that artistic transformation, which began more than a century ago. Seeing the works together not only exemplifies the path towards objectualising the painting but also functions to establish the origins of Paternosto’s own artistic evolution in the 1970s:

“The fact that the painting is also an object”, he explains, “a thing (a canvas on a stretcher), is something that was only fully recognised in the 20th century. […] In a dialogue, which I hope will be fruitful and revealing, with works from the collection of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza which I have been invited to choose […], a selection of my works from the 1970s reveals my aspiration to make the painting an object that has to be read as a whole: a (seemingly) empty front surface plus the sides with thicker than usual stretcher bars, on which the pictorial theme is represented.”

“It is clear that when we refer to a painting as an object we are located in front of a thing […] Nonetheless, as Adorno observed: ‘It is the spirit that makes works of art, things among things, something different from them.’”

César Paternosto (born La Plata, Argentina, 1931) is a painter, sculptor and theoretician. He lived in New York between 1967 and 2004 and now lives in Segovia. Paternosto attended drawing classes from a very young age and after a brief period as a lawyer devoted himself exclusively to painting. From the outset he worked in an abstract mode, initially of an Expressionist then a geometrical type, thus allying himself with the great Latin American avant-garde tradition. Within this context he evolved towards a “sensitive geometry”, in which coldness was counterbalanced by the delicacy of the tones and a subtle irregularity of the lines.

Within the Western art tradition the pictorial field had always been oriented towards the centre of the canvas. Nonetheless, in his mature work Piet Mondrian imposed a type of compositional dispersion, eliminating the frame and gently pushing the pictorial elements towards the periphery of the painting. In 1969 Paternosto discovered the expressive potential of the edges of the canvas, which allowed him to transform the work into an object, introducing a new space for painting that required a modification of the viewer’s traditional position in relation to the work. This was a logical consequence of the precedent set by Mondrian which had a surprising result given that his painting is not directly offered to the public but is rather hidden so that the viewer seeks it out through an oblique approach.

Paternosto, however, goes beyond even that objectualising of painting. His works are self-aware objects that possess the virtue of presenting themselves, without even the help of their own creator, explaining what type of objects they are, where they come from and with which works by other artists they establish dialogues, as in this case with New York City, 3 (unfinished), Composition no. XIII / Composition 2 and Composition of Colours / Composition no. 1 with Red and Blue by Mondrian, Man with a Clarinet by Picasso, Still life by Gris, and Wood Planes of Colour by Torres-García.