Vicente Grondona

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1977

            The power of Vicente Grondona's work lies in the intense dialogue he established with the classical traditions of drawing, painting and modern sculpture and, at the same time, his opening of a new space for experimentation in contemporary Argentine art at the beginning of the 21st century. Emerging from the mythical Buenos Aires gallery Belleza y Felicidad, the artist's trajectory shows a way of working in which the invention and testing of the materials and their properties is as fundamental as the sensitive effects he achieves with his human figures and landscapes. In this sense, the concentration and recurrence of media such as charcoal, wood, chlorine, aniline, oil, pigments and their varied combination with more synthetic products such as epoxy, cement or hydro-lacquer, translates in the materials an oscillation central to his work: the tension between the expression of matter and the artist's impression. 

            His production, also influenced by a long stay in Paris, can be thought of as a hybrid between the graphic and the sculptural, from which he creates a whole imaginary inspired by recognizable motifs: the experience of love, solitude, nature. This encounter, between elements that have a powerful visual attraction –bright surfaces, rough volumes, vivid colors, energetic strokes– and figurative forms that appear and can be glimpsed between the lines and saturation zones of the compositions or in the solid blocks of coal, wood or cement, activates a full set of classical, romantic, modern and contemporary topics. 

            This insistence and pause in Grondona's works, which seems committed to bringing scenes from an imagined past to the present, generates an obsessive circulation of figures and forms open to the archaeological gaze of the viewer, who digs into the successive accumulated layers, to find, perhaps, the center of the artist's poetics: the formal and philosophical problem of the gesture. The gesture of the artist in his creative process, but also the gesture of his images, petrified in an inventory of expressions and postures. Grondona's career includes shows and exhibitions in Argentina, in institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and abroad.