Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
In 1974 the CAYC began focusing a great deal of its attention on this project, promoting a variety of initiatives in exhibitions that traveled around a contemporary circuit consisting of new cultural spaces and centers that were emerging in Europe at the time. The exhibition Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica was presented in a number of cities until 1976, providing an overview of recent regional works that were compatible with the approach to “arte de sistemas.”
As part of the CAYC’s promotional efforts in support of the first edition of this exhibition presented at the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC) in Antwerp, this newsletter published a text by the Guatemalan artist Arnoldo Ramírez Amaya (b. 1944), who is incorrectly identified here as being “Nicaraguan.” This detail would be corrected in subsequent newsletters (see GT-391 [doc. no. 1476533]).
The author of this text is also a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. In 1973, shortly before he was invited to show his work at the CAYC’s exhibitions in Belgium, Ramírez Amaya and other Guatemalan artists created a number of murals at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC); these works alluded to the nightmarish military repression that Guatemala was enduring at that time. This text discusses Prueba de artista de la realidad, a work that addressed the need for a distinctly Latin American kind of art that was emancipated from international influences—a kind of art that sought to become yet another form of resistance in the turbulent sociopolitical circumstances that were convulsing the continent in those days. These reflections were therefore on the same wavelength as the messages the CAYC was transmitting in its communiques, which were usually signed by its director.
