Roberto Aizenberg

Entre Ríos, Argentina, 1928 - Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1996

            A favorite disciple of the painter Juan Batlle Planas, Roberto Aizenberg was formed under the effects of his disturbing imaginary. A late follower of surrealism, his artistic preaching developed contrary to the trends of his time, which were inclined towards abstraction, concrete art and pictorial informalism. On the contrary, the artist from Entre Ríos chose to persist in a line of work focused on exploring the hallucinatory dimensions of his time. This eccentricity led him, not to execute fully and without nuances the aesthetic program of André Breton and his followers, but to traverse with his sensibility the set of problems that surrealism had set in motion: the psychic world, the exploration of the unconscious, the dictates of thought, the attention to the lateral states of consciousness, the liberation of chance as a generating force. 

            Thus, the motifs and procedures of the avant-garde emerge in his works slightly intellectualized, placed at a distance and graphically translated into recognizable genres. In fact, the automatism of his motifs comes from a very meditated artistic discipline, an implementation that begins with the drawing to achieve the necessary adjustments in the final image. This, the result of a process of asceticism and technical refinement, discards the seduction of the interior to open up to the representation of space. His painting is precise, finished, endowed with an economy that eliminates the accessory and invites us to reflect on the act of looking. 

            Therefore, his great works such as El incendio en el colegio jasidista de Minsk, 1713, or Padre e hijo contemplando la sombra de un día are the result of the reworking of dreamlike remnants, intimate memories or visionary intuitions. His scenes seem suspended in time, the characters (if any) are immersed in an ancestral stillness, the skies open wide and limpid.

            The refinement of his compositions summons the metaphysical period of Giorgio De Chirico's work. In them we see three constructive elements that are the foundation of his practice: space, light and architecture. The result is a borderline territory between dream and wakefulness, between the exterior world and the interior world, between abstraction and figuration, between the erasure of the human and its necessary presence. Aizenberg's constructions are placed in this space, neither ancient nor modern, neutral, orthogonal, empty, without ornaments or details, but always unprecedented, distilled from the silent atmosphere that his painting produces.