Juan Pablo Renzi

Casilda, Argentina, 1940 - Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1992

           Renzi often said, "Painting always reflects the mind of the painter," so that he could provoke and break with the conventions of the moment. His path is wide and ever-changing, from the conceptual and political experimentation of the 60s to the meticulousness of object realism and the connection between plastic art and poetry at the end of his life: his work was his way of being in action in the world.

           His interest in painting came early, when he wanted to recover the craft that his grandfather and great-grandfather had developed. But as he grew older, he acknowledged that his first contact with "true painting" occurred at the age of fifteen when he learned of anarchist painter Gustavo Crochet in Pergamino, his hometown. While exploring this discipline, he also studied Biochemistry at the National University of Rosario, a career he soon abandoned so that he could be trained in the workshop of Juan Grela, where he established relations with the Rosario avant-garde.

           The relationship between thought and aesthetics in the 1960s is a watershed moment in which ideological reflection becomes a creative matter. The work Paisaje con gran nube (1966) [Landscape with Huge Cloud] not only breaks the usual framing–the frames expand and the water vapor overflows–but moves away from the classic model of easel painting exhibition to accompany the emergence of the painting object. The crossovers between aesthetic innovation and political transformation are undoubtedly its context, but in Renzi’s work they are also the theme and substratum of the work.

           His participation in the experience of Tucumán Arde (1968) [Tucumán Burns] is the condensation of a vital concern: the criticism of the media, the repressive regime, the conventional art exhibited in galleries and museums, and the search for heterodox spaces, non-plastic materials, and new supports, such as performance, installations, and pamphlets. These elements, lacking the intensity of the time, remain latent and emerge in unexpected ways in his later work.

           The avant-garde decline of the 60s kept him away from painting for almost a decade. It was a time of "abstinence", as he called it. But Renzi returned to the plastic arts at the end of the 1970s with a conceptual realism of mundane characters and objects. The everyday, however, is not a naive apology of the microscopic, but a rarefied effect of the real that plays with light, color, and photographic resources with a political vocation that is never exhausted. That same provocative gesture is regenerated in the series of “estrellas e instrumentos para estrellar” (“stars and instruments to crash”) of the 80s, where he entangles the geometric shapes of the stars and the hammers of the symbolic imaginary of the left while exploring the drifts of political art.

           In his latest works, he incorporates text, typography, and urban signage. It is the return of the street: design, rock music, and the written word amalgamate overflowing the limits of the plastic in a new provocation to the dominant common sense. The connection between creation, concept, and thought is updated in a way of perception that dialogues with the contemporary: "Nothing that is placed in a painting is innocent, everything is there to be interpreted."