Emma Alvarez Piñeiro: Terra Mia

Emma Alvarez Piñeiro, Pura Pampa, 2010, mixed media on canvas with acrylic, cloth, pleather and the artist’s hair, 31” x 48.” Photo: Mariano Costa Peuser.

By Marina Reyes-Franco

In “The End,” Jorge Luis Borges’ short story response to the Argentine epic Martín Fierro, he writes, “The plains, in the last rays of the sun, were almost abstract, as though seen in a dream.” The Pampas Borges described have long inspired travelers, writers and artists, and have been a recurrent theme in Emma Alvarez Piñeiro’s painting for several decades. In her most recent work shown at Arch Gallery, Terra Mia, Alvarez Piñeiro revisits these mythical landscapes in soothing, calmer variations of whites and metallic colors, providing an insight into a long life lived through art by a woman at peace with herself.

Throughout her career, Alvarez Piñeiro has worked in a wide range of media, including her first love, graphics, as well as painting and sculpture that varied from assemblage to metalworks. Her production has been constant and prolific since her early years in Buenos Aires specializing in graphic techniques at the National School of Fine Arts, which she later developed at Atelier 17 in Paris under Stanley W. Hayter. The thrill of living in a cultural capital led her to New York from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, during which she received her MFA from Hunter College, studied with Krishna Reddy at New York University and at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. As she refocused on painting instead of graphic art, she was awarded the Individual Artist Fellowship in Painting by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980. Life as a New Yorker suited her well, especially with the political turmoil back in her native Argentina, where a brutal dictatorship ruled from 1976 through 1983. Throughout the years, her New York loft became a meeting place for artists such as Leandro Katz, Luis Frangella, Juan Mele, David Lamela, Jorge Tacla, Raul Conti, Liliana Porter and Marta Minujin, as well as performers Mercedes Sosa and Julio Bocca; a gathering place for expatriates.

Emma Alvarez Piñeiro, Gravity, 2013, stainless steel and cable, 72” x 56.” Photo: Mariano Costa Peuser.

It was precisely during the 1970s that Alvarez Piñeiro, though always interested in abstraction, first worked on the abstract landscape paintings that now occupy most of her creative energy. She has been surprisingly consistent in her explorations of the Pampean landscape, whether through vibrant earthy colors in large abstract paintings or as part of figurative works, such as in the Miscommunication series from the 1980s and the Mirror’s Dream series from the 1990s. Alvarez Piñeiro has long zoomed in and out of the Argentine earth, looking into what troubles it-and herself. The artist points out that “in each decade my work had a subject in which the other and I were represented in abstract form. In two periods, figuration was deeply necessary in order to express myself. Throughout my career, I’ve been abstract; it’s in the pure simplicity of spaces that I feel most represented.” Certainly, her abstractions are not just exercises in color, texture and shape, but also surrogate self-portraits.

Although born in Buenos Aires, she admits to having traveled much more throughout the Americas than the nearby Pampas. This land, however, constitutes an emotional landscape that has become her favorite artistic habitat. The Pampas have historically been, and continued to be, Argentina’s economic motor and a big part of the cultural production of the country. This landscape is as tedious as it is breathtaking in its immensity, and a structural constant in Alvarez Piñeiro’s work. In “The End,” Borges describes an hour in the evening “when the plains seem on the verge of saying something,” and complains “they never do, or perhaps they do-eternally-though we don’t understand it, or perhaps we do understand but what they say is as untranslatable as music.” Using this geographical space, with its horizontal lines, curves, slight variations of the terrain and deep cuts into the ground, she has created a series of works that span several decades, picking up again where she last left off, with varying techniques and personal insight. Alvarez Piñero’s work concerns itself with the surface but also with what lies beneath the earth and what feeds the roots, likening a painting to her subconscious.

Emma Alvarez Piñeiro, Terra Nova Series, 2012, acrylic on canvas with pumice, 10" x10”. Photo: Mariano Costa Peuser.

In the Terra Mia series, the artist presents her latest work, a series of white-on-white paintings and sculptures that deconstruct the Pampas. The exhibit’s central piece is Gravity, a large and heavy stainless-steel sculpture, as well as two smaller ones. The material refers to the past and present exploitation of metal, specifically the silver that helped forge the Argentine Republic. Nowadays, as Argentina once again captures the interest of transnational mining companies, the country is once again the land of metal-with potentially grave environmental consequences. The choice of color in her paintings is a strong indicator of how Alvarez Piñeiro feels at this point in her life. The paintings are constructed with varying tones of whites, rich textures applied to the canvas, as well as a few metallic colors that recall the mineral world.

The early Venezuelan Modernist Armando Reverón used to say that in the palette, the only color you need is white, it being a synthesis of all the other colors. When all the frequencies of visible light are irradiated at the same time, the result is white light, like the sun’s. According to Alvarez Piñeiro, these works are characteristically horizontal, with “calm almost transparent zones, revealing the vastness of space, my innermost, with its voids and mounds.” The use of white lets us experience a calmer, gentler, more at peace woman than the one who painted intricate tree roots referencing the depths of despair her country was experiencing during the military rule or the personal and family drama expressed in her figurative work. Perhaps she no longer feels like she needs to tame the landscape and its inhabitants. Alvarez Piñeiro’s work is abstract while still referencing the outside world, yet what she is trying to convey now is not only a visual experience, but a certain peace of mind.

Emma Alvarez Pineiro’s latest works will be on view at Arch Gallery’s booth during Art Wynwood from February 13 - 17, 2014. The opening reception for, “Emma Alvarez Piñeiro: Terra Mia, A Journey Within,” curated by Daniela Montana, will be held on Saturday March 1, 2014, at 8 p.m. at Arch Gallery in Miami’s Shenandoah neighborhood at 1619 SW 13 St. / Phone 305 644 7500 / www.archgallery.us.

Marina Reyes-Franco is a freelance writer and curator. She pursued a master’s degree in Argentine and Latin American art history at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires.