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Arte generativo.
Style of Argentine painting named in 1959 by EDUARDO MACENTYRE and MIGUEL ANGEL VIDAL to describe their work, with its power to generate optical sequences by circular, vertical and horizontal displacement, and based on their studies of Georges Vantongerloo. Developing the tradition of geometric abstraction that had emerged in Argentina in the 1940s with groups such as Arte Concreto Invención, Movimiento Madí and Perceptismo, the aim of these artists was to extol the beauty and perfection of geometry through line and colour. They and the collector Ignacio Pirovano (1919–80), who acted as their theorist, were soon joined by the engineer and painter Baudes Gorlero (1912–59), who as well as creating his own work also analysed its development mathematically. All three artists were awarded prizes in 1959 in the Argentine competition Plástica con plásticos by a jury that consisted of the French critic Michel Ragon, the American museum director Thomas Messer (b 1920), the French painter Germaine Derbecq (1899–1973) and the Argentine critic Aldo Pellegrini (1903–75), shortly after which Gorlero died. MacEntyre and Vidal produced the Arte generativo manifesto in 1960, not as a theoretical statement but as a ‘clarification of ideas’. They distinguished the adjective ‘generative’ (‘able to produce or engender’) from the verb ‘to engender’ (‘to procreate, to propagate the same species, to cause, occasion, form’) and from the noun ‘generatrix’ (‘a point, line or surface whose motion generates a line, surface or solid’). After exploring these ideas more fully they suggested that shapes ‘produce power through the sensation of breaking free from and wishing to penetrate the basic plane and energy from the displacements and vibrations that they produce’. Both MacEntyre and Vidal relied on an analytical process, organizing basic units (curved lines for MacEntyre, straight lines in Vidal’s case) in accordance with constant laws and subjecting them to inventive variations characterized by an impeccable technique, splendid colour and surprising power.
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