Mondongo Group: A dazzling baptistery in the microcentro

To the surprise that holds the unexpected presence of art in full Microcentro Porteño, in Arthaus Center (Bartolomé Miter almost reconquest), the pleasure of the meeting with the wonderful works of the group is added Mondongo (Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha) and a sculpture of Gabriel Chaile (1985). In the entrance lobby of a neutral line building that housed a bank in its origin, it is located “Mom Luchona” The sculpture modeled in mud by Chaile.

The work occupied a place in the Trienal 2021 of the New Museum and holds a peculiar miscegenation with pre -Columbian art. There are the genuine features of Chailethe indigenous roots of a unique and unmistakable artist. Tucumano sculptures could be associated with those of Nadin Ospina. However, while Ospina Cross the forms of pre -Columbian art with the characters of Disney, Chaile rescues his identity through his own family history.

And so tell: “I grew surrounded by an incredible family of narrators. My parents, often expressed through the narrative the history of their lives as individuals and as children, or telling the lives of their own parents, those of the members of our extended family, the history of the region and the country as well. We loved it; It was a process of registering memory in ourselves, our stories became the threads that wove the fabric of my sense of belonging in the world. Through these stories I began to feel that I was entitled to something, a knowledge, a history, a cultural memory. ”

Near his workshop in his mouth, Chaile He created a great biomorphic sculpture in Adobe, which also functioned as a gigantic mud oven, just when Art Basel managers, hired by the city government arrived to mobilize the Circuit of Buenos Aires art.

In 2018, the director of the week Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires, was the Italian Cecilia Alemanithen responsible for the New York High Line, and subsequently appointed general curator of the Venice Biennale. Attracted to the contemporaneity of the pre -Columbian reasons led to a monumental dimension, first, he invited him to Chaile To integrate the Buenos Aires sample and then, the Venetian Biennial. Thus the tucumano occupied a crucial place in the arsenales.

With his successful surreal call, “The milk of dreams”inspired by the book of Leonora Carringtonthe muse of Max Ernst, Germani He composed the last mega-sample really dedicated to art at the Venetian Biennial. The theme inspired several exhibitions, such as Pompidou and also raised the price of Carrington Eduardo Costantini paid a record for Carrington In international auctions, and also bought the five pieces of Chaile That, without a doubt, they are the genesis of Malba ports.

Tripe Arthaus occupies, the mezzanine is dedicated to the projection of a didactic film on the well -known series of skulls. On the first floor the two skulls that belong to Andrés Buharan exemplary collector. The space was founded so that the public can access free and free of charge to contemplate the large installation of Tripehe “Baptistery of colors”the installation that occupies a part of the terrace. After being exposed in the Barro gallery, and despite the visual happiness that provides the viewer, the fate of the “Baptistery of colors” It was to finish in a deposit.

Thus the Arthaus Center project arose and arrived as a loan (artists do not want to sell it). However, the collector Buhar He won a celebrity when he bought the imposing installation “Landscapes”also from Tripe for $ 1,270,000, the highest price paid for art in Argentina -at least, openly. A gesture to celebrate. It is not a secret that an important part of the works of the Argentine avant -garde, whole collections, are being sold for extremely low values.

In your artistic search Laffitte and Mendanha They arrived at the Plaza del Duomo in Florence and knew the San Juan Baptisterium, with their white and green marbles and its special design. The works of Tripe They usually cross discontinuous times. In this case, an abyss from the Renaissance and, subsequently, the time of the Bauhaus school, to be placed in the fullest contemporaneity. Without losing an apex of splendor and beauty along the way.

Thus they built a dodecahedron of more than six meters in diameter, with iron, wood, mirrors, and used 3,276 blocks of different plasticine colors that, neatly ordered inside acquire the magical condition that seeks the mathematical order. Each block carries the nomenclator carved on its surface with the color formula. Visitors must step on the mirror soil to perceive that thousands of blocks reproduce to infinity for the effect of a mirror ceiling.

The work is a tribute to the architecture of the Baptistery of Florence and, above all, to plasticine, material that, kneaded as clay, determines new sculptural possibilities and accentuates the seduction of color and shape. The qualities are many but the diversity of procedures is complex: when heating it it is possible to use it as if it were oil in the paintings. In this way, the elaborate manual work with plasticine inaugurates new models of visual thought, an exclusive lineage of Tripewhich began to experiment with this material in 2002.

To the joy of the fans of Mondongo, “Landscape” will have in Puerto Madero the space that the work deserves. You can see the real dimension that is lost today in the exhibition of Malba Ports.