Art, a Desperate Craft por Ángeles Ascúa

ART, A DESPERATE CRAFT

By Ángeles Ascúa

Rosario is three-hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires. It is an area marked by profuse intellect and aesthetic dissidence, with a radical gaze moving in a geographic setting that stretches along the banks of the Paraná River and is intertwined in the legends and ecstatic euphoria of the littoral region. This is the landscape of Argentina’s third largest city, home to the artist Claudia del Río.

The river embraces the city from end to end; it is understandable that, with its dazzling presence, Del Río transformed it into an instrument for a series of isochromatic paintings entitled “Litoral y Coca Cola‘‘ [‘Littoral and Coca Cola’] (2009). One inherent quality of her work is the particular way in which she treats the materials, in such a way that her method suggests alchemy, somewhat like the mystery the secret formula of the drink mentioned represents for mankind. For these works, Del Río prepared an unctuous and grainy paint whose colours range from reds to browns and which adamantly evoke the muddy waters of the Paraná. Some of the motifs depicted include geometric buoys floating adrift, two wild animals, and a cabin against the horizon, all of which could have been sketched with a stick on one of the riverbanks, in a loving osmosis.

Related to this work is the set of portraits the artist titled “El extraordinario caso de los pájaros que dibujan” [‘The Extraordinary Case of the Drawing Birds’], created between 2006 and 2018.1 These drawings were made in pencil using a tiny motif of figure eights repeated infinitely to form a uniform, fabric-like texture on which she then places the eyes, a nose, a mouth, a flower, and other particular traits. Del Río says that these drawings appeared to her with the morning song of a thrush

1 The series originated during her residency in Mojácar, Spain. The area is known for its olive groves.

which, like a mantra, was composed of figure eights that wove for her a space to listen. However, the most remarkable characteristic of the portraits is that they were executed over the stains of the linseed oil that had been poured on the paper, creating halos and reactions with the medium that fascinated the artist. It was a slow process because she had to wait for the stains to settle and dry. It is a curious, experimental quest, and the combination of elements is certainly unorthodox. This same audacity of bringing together incompatible elements appears in her repertoire of images that brings together everything from the mass-marketed iconographies of Mickey and Oaky, to emoticons that, paradoxically, appear in delicate drawings. It also manifests in her use of incongruous materials, such as small pieces of aluminium from soda cans that are placed among art history plates, or the overlap of a map of her country with the same cellophane paper we are used to seeing wrapped around the bouquets at flower stalls on street corners.2

This same quest is also evident in her photomontages, in which she often exaggerates quantities or certain characteristics, or insists on certain procedures, as can be seen in her series of collages from 1992, in which images of pieces of raw meat appear where one would expect to find a bottle of soda, a man’s torso or a dancer’s dress.

Claudia del Río has been a professor of Fine Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario since 1989. When I was a student, I remember it was difficult to find her in the classroom. Claudia camouflaged herself in the class, partly through her vibrancy, but especially through her approach as a teacher. One of the first things she asked us to do was to put together a folder of images, cut-outs and things that were of interest. The folder would work as a database; it was like something between the collection of a fan who keeps the ticket stub for every concert they ever attended by their favourite band, a memory book assembled by a mother for her children, and Walter Benjamin’s Passages or Malraux’s Imaginary Museum. Del Río uses her archive as a system for recording, storing and creating images that become inventories, atlases or treasures. It is an artistic creation programme, a mixture of mechanical sequencing and organisational aesthetics.

We can see the traces of this cumulative method in her collages and assembled objects, with their body of images, references and objects from different times, as

2 ‘Why bring these items together? And why, when we witness these encounters, are we left with an impression of inconvenience, of the inconvenience that we find ourselves witnessing encounters that should not have taken place, and that we should not now have to observe?’ Reinaldo Laddaga, Claudia del Río: Cien imágenes huérfanas, Rosario, Museo Castagnino, July 2000 [Catalogue].

well as in her love of large series of works that she continues over a long period of time, and in her building of collections, such as the drawings of beds that she requested of her students at the beginning of every year, or the letters she so carefully saves in a folder, which are the result of the epistolary relationship she maintained with Edgardo Antonio Vigo for fifteen years.

This process also appears in Ministerio de vida abundante [Ministry of Abundant Life], the collection of notebooks she produced between 1962 and 2015. Del Río has always kept a diary. The editing of these texts – in which she explores different lines of research in education, her artistic practice, and her daily life – resulted in the book Ikebana político [Political Ikebana], published by Iván Rosado in 2016.

Words also make appearances in Claudia del Río’s visual work. Calligraphy is always prominent, as if sculpted. The texts are always short, sometimes just a single word. Del Río likes to name things, write slogans, make statements in her drawings. These are presented in an austere manner, either in black India ink on paper – like one in which the handwriting says ‘drawing gave me a life’ – or on letter boards. Similarly, she constructed a series of drawings of girls shown in close-up and wearing T-shirts – as the expression goes, ‘showing their colours’ – with slogans such as: “Si hay sufrimiento no es amor” (‘If there’s suffering, it’s not love’), “Nadie es ilegal” (‘No one is illegal’), and “Tenemos que soportar tanta raza” (‘We have to put up with so much race’).

Downtown Rosario stretches over a radius of approximately twenty-five blocks, which you could say concentrates almost all of the life of the city. This focus of activity favours meeting and working with others. Nevertheless, Del Río’s home and studio is located far from the centre. There is a literary cliché that can be used to refer to these kinds of places, removed from the city: the locus amoenus (‘pleasant place’). It is a frequent motif that also appears throughout the history of painting, and is often a place of mystery, a privileged spot for reflection and encounters, where the passions can be freely explored far from civilisation and, in this way, remain on the margin of that rigid social structure that tends to suppress spontaneity and regulate our behaviour. Many of Claudia del Río’s drawings depict such places. One is titled Paisaje de muertos [Landscape of the Dead] (2011). It depicts two people lying in the middle of a clearing in the jungle, while a third contemplative presence gazes at them, sitting peacefully on the roots of a tree. She constructed this pleasant sylvan biome using nothing but a pencil, exploiting and mastering the qualities of her instrument in order to capture the curls and springs of the buds with tight lines, and to draw each of the textures of the foliage. Her decision to live in a location that is,

geographically speaking, far removed from the centre of the city, is a way of localizing her life and is also something we can see in her works.

Another fundamental aspect of Claudía del Río’s work is the idea of community. Since 2002, she has run a busy calendar of events for the Club del Dibujo [Drawing Club],3 a platform that brings together people, images, and knowledge, through meetings between artists and amateurs. The project considers drawing to be a social capital that brings transparency to our system of beliefs and ideas in a simple way, thanks to its rapid availability. One of its many slogans reads, ‘Wherever you are, you can draw’. Through the club, Del Río developed ideas to transform teaching, which have materialised through a multitude of creative strategies, such as the creation of the Escuela lenta de dibujantes [Slow School for Sketchers], the organisation of extensive barter days, an extensive collection of materials specifically related to drawing, and the dissemination of all this information through a blog.

She also created Pieza Pizarrón [Blackboard Room], a mechanism in which she merges art, theatre and teaching. Since its creation in 2006, it has been installed in practically every type of location: plazas, cultural centres, theatres and museums. The desire to connect and be visual – in which community is a social ideal that always takes place through the other – can also be seen in her creation of RUSA, a Residence for a Single Artist that takes place in her own home, as well as in the professorships she oversees at the university and in her duo, Trulalala.4

Her works are proof that there are no limits to drawing: for her it is an empirical moment of complete freedom. And yet, contradictorily, she has a penchant for imposing her own obstacles, such as using a ruler, or at times using hard pencil leads, or drawing with her left hand. Roland Barthes said that to draw with our left hand is to use an uncontrollable ductus; it is not suitable as an instrument.5 To him, these clumsy gestures evoke the circle of those who are excluded or marginalised, and are associated with children or the crippled. For her undergraduate thesis, Del Río

3 Claudia del Río and Mario Germín founded the Club del Dibujo based on the manifesto, “Promoción internacional para el estudio y la práctica autodidacta del dibujo” [‘International promotion for the study and self-taught practice of drawing’], by América Sánchez and Norberto Chávez. 4 The duo consists of Claudia del Río and the artist Carlos Herrera.

5 According to the author, ‘for as long as mankind has practised writing by hand, excluding the printing press, it was the path the hand travels and not the visual perception of its work that was the fundamental act by which letters were defined, studied and classified; this regimented act is what in palaeography is called the ductus: the hand guides the strokes’. Roland Barthes, Lo obvio y lo obtuso. Imágenes, gestos, voces, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1986.

undertook field work at the Fracassi Neuropathic Clinic in Rosario. For many years, she also ran a painting workshop at the Viktor Tausk Psychiatry Institute, and curated the exhibition Enciclopedia Oliveros,6 based on the works created by patients at the Dr. Abelardo Irigoyen Freyre Psychiatric Hospital. In the exhibition catalogue, she stated: ‘Art and madness, in their private forms, are cases of great temptation. Both have institutional forms. Both are produced in social withdrawal; madness is constructed and a painter is constructed in withdrawal, therefore we could say that they are constructs of disengagements.’7

Del Río is a highly prolific artist who practices her gifts in the most unlikely formats, which is why it is pointless to pigeonhole her into a genre that fits within the traditional canon.8 She also expresses her fondness for humble materials through her preference for working on small, domestic and portable supports.

There is a definite trend towards reiteration in Del Río’s work. There is something about the manual labour, about the patience of beginning a time-consuming work that is constructed at the same time. Since 1999, she has embroidered phrases taken from the headlines of police news stories on silk scraps, often heinous crimes that have been transformed into somewhat ridiculous headlines. Just like the crime stories that continue to occur, the series is never-ending.

This manual work also allows the passage of time to be blocked out, to make it more enjoyable. In one of her 2021 drawings, created amidst the stupor of the pandemic, Del Río wrote, ‘God is looking for things to do that occupy his hands, so he can stop thinking. You shout out to him, “get busy braiding and crocheting shawls‘’.‘

In this lifelong exercise of otherness, she considers her practice political.

6 Together with Fabiana Ímola and Max Cachimba. 7 Claudia del Río, Enciclopedia Oliveros, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, June 2014, p. 12 [Catalogue]. 8 In the text that accompanied Claudia del Río’s exhibition Idealister, held between May and July 2018 at the Museo Genaro Pérez in Córdoba, curator Nancy Rojas argued that her works ‘bear witness to her eagerness to be the other in the very act of writing, painting, embroidering, in her constant fleeing from style, considering it to be one of the matrixes of traditions revealing male dominance’.

Hago ikebana del litoral, te parece mentira, a mí también. Hago ikebana con lo que junto. Leños prendidos, noticias de mala muerte. Hago ikebana del litoral, costumbrismo de mí. Miro las curvas del tronco encontrado: no se podrán dibujar, por más que llame a los virtuosos. Hago ikebana en el oasis que me regalaste, es de barro de la barranca de la luna. I do littoral ikebana, believe it or not, so do I. I do ikebana with what I gather. Burning logs, sleazy headlines. I do littoral ikebana, it is my own custom. I look at the curves of the trunk I found: they can’t be drawn, no matter how much I call on the Virtues. I do ikebana in the oasis you gave me, it’s made of mud from the canyons of the moon.9

9 Claudia del Río, Litoral y Cocacola, Rosario, Iván Rosado, 2012, p. 18.

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