Clorindo Testa

Benevento, Italia (1923) – Buenos Aires, Argentina (2013)

            Clorindo Testa, the master of strange shapes, was born in Italy because his father wanted him to be born in his homeland, and three months later they returned to the country on a long boat trip. At the age of 16 he went to the city of La Plata to study Naval Engineering, fascinated by the construction of the wooden battleships that he patiently assembled at home. He traveled for a year by train from Constitución to La Plata until he had to take his exams and dropped out. Not yet knowing that he could study architecture, Clorindo went through different faculties until he finally arrived at what would mark his life and the history of Argentine architecture. 

            After graduating, the University of Buenos Aires awarded him a scholarship for a study trip to Italy, France and Spain. It was in a boarding house in Seville where he completed his first painting. According to his own account, it was the first time that he did not reproduce something that someone else had done, but rather intervened on what he saw. In 1951, Testa returned to Argentina knowing that he wanted to devote himself to architecture and painting. He set up a studio with former classmates and began to prepare an exhibition for the following year at the invitation of a gallery owner. 

            Inspired by Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect of 20th century's most modern constructions, Testa planted structures on the Pampa plains that burst into nature and at the same time blend into the landscape. He erected buildings as if he were making a sculpture and worked with concrete as if it were a malleable material. At some point, many of his paintings represented the fine outline of future cities. His artistic work was forged in different stages. His first exhibition was held in 1952, at the Van Riel Gallery, when his works were linked to figuration. Towards the mid-50s, he leaned towards free abstraction; and, between 1960 and 1965, he joined informalism and worked only with whites, blacks, and grays. In the 1970s, he recovered color and a figuration that permeates the codes of architecture to address an ecological and humanist theme in which history and present times open a critical debate with ironic overtones. 

            He was an architect-artist as well as an artist-architect, who found it perfectly coherent to install glyptodonts and boats in the center of the city. His work El grito en el balcón (1975) expresses the dilemmas of architecture and guides us in the understanding of a time of social conflict; it shows his incessant and reflexive search about his task. Through his drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations, Testa considered, from the architect's meditation, life in the city and urban problems, the historical implications of plagues, and the myths of American and Argentine history to shape a plastic legacy that is as important as it is singular.