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.
During the 1970s, Glusberg forged a network of contacts in South American and international institutions based on a common interest in the experimental practices that were all the rage at the time. He shared programs with them that addressed this subject in an attempt to encourage the production and exhibition of Conceptual works at a time when Latin America was living with violent dictatorships and coups d’états.
“Cesc” (1922–2006)—the pseudonym used by the Catalonian artist Francesc Vila y Rufa—was a painter and a printmaker and was well known for his humorous graphic works; he was a committed creator whose work was infused with social awareness. He was a chronicler of everyday life under the thumb of the Franco dictatorship in Spain, producing drawings without words that criticized abuses of power, bureaucracy, consumerism, and economic crises, all under the political repression and censorship imposed by that regime, which lasted four decades (1939–75).
Encouraged by Edgardo Antonio Vigo—who had been writing critical essays about comics in Hexágono 71 magazine since 1971 (GT-352 [doc. no. 1476498])—the CAYC organized an exhibition of Cesc’s work in Buenos Aires. This exhibition testified to Glusberg’s early interest in comics as a language at the heart of Latin American art. Years later the director of the center would state that that linguistic resource: “anticipates a convergence that is no mere collection of elements nor the mechanical sum of techniques, but the production of something aesthetically new […]. When we say that any stylistic change implies a semantic change, we want to underscore the specific nature of the link between comics and future Latin American art” (Jorge Glusberg, Retórica del Arte Latinoamericano, 1978).
