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 an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
The exhibition Gráficos argentinos ‘74, which was organized in early 1974 and presented at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company’s headquarters in Chicago, was one of the many initiatives undertaken by the CAYC to display Argentinean art on the international stage. This particular show, presented in the United States, featured artists who explored a range of different printmaking techniques to create their works. It should be noted that Chicago is a city with a long tradition in this particular field. [See GT-357 (doc. no. 1476511) and a version presented in Bordeaux, France [GT-460 (doc. no. 1476859)].
The article includes a copy of a review of the exhibition of Argentinean works, written by Harold Haydon (1909–1994), the visual artist, educator, and art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Haydon discusses the works, noting their ability to express social criticism. He mentions the participating artists, which include Luis (Fernando) Benedit and Jacques Bedel (members of the Grupo de los Trece, who were early contributors to the center’s activities). The critic also comments on works by Mirta Tocci, Sergio Camporeale, Daniel Zelaya, Jorge Álvaro, and Héctor Borla. This exhibition showed that the CAYC was reaching out to include the figurative trends (realism, Neo-Surrealism, and Photorealism, among others) that were being shown at that time at major international competitions such as the Paris Biennale (1971) and documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972). Events of that nature were soon matched in Buenos Aires at the Panorama de la pintura argentina joven (1971), presented by the Fundación Lorenzutti at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the Marcelo De Ridder (1973–77) and Benson & Hedges (1977–84) competitions, which were both organized by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.
Haydon refers to the exhibition catalogue, mentioning the CAYC’s standardized approach to publication. To illustrate many of its exhibitions, the center circulated a sheet of paper marked off with a grid that artists could use to submit their works. This process meant that each work could be reproduced on different supports in many formats, such as the CAYC’s newsletters or external publications such as Héxagono´71, the magazine published by Edgardo Antonio Vigo. This system led to a wider circulation of images and increased promotion of the CAYC’s projects in other countries. Something similar happened with the reproduction of heliographic prints in several of the center’s publications [see GT-133 (doc. no. 1476312)].
