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 (see GT-357 [doc. no. 1476511]), which was organized in early 1974 and presented at the Illinois Bell Telephone Company in Chicago, was one of the many initiatives undertaken by the CAYC to display Argentinean art on the international stage. This particular show featured artists who explored a range of different printmaking techniques and took place in a city with a long tradition in this field. The list of participating artists includes some who worked with the center on a regular basis, such as Jacques Bedel and Luis Fernando Benedit—both of whom were members of the Grupo de los Trece—and Nicolás García Uriburu. Others were included for the first time in this event: Pablo Obelar, Sergio Camporeale, Delia Cugat, and Daniel Zelaya, who were members of the Grabas group (Grabadores de Buenos Aires).
These new additions to the roster of participants showed that the CAYC was reaching out to include the figurative trends (realism, Neo-Surrealism, and Photorealism, among others) that were emerging at that time at major international exhibitions such as documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972) and the Paris Biennale (1971). Events of that nature were soon matched in Buenos Aires: the Panorama de la pintura argentina joven (1971) was presented by the Fundación Lorenzutti at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the Marcelo De Ridder (1973–77) and Benson & Hedges (1977–84) competitions were both directed by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
For many of its exhibition catalogues, the center distributed a sheet with a set grid where artists could sign up. With this method the CAYC could reproduce each artist’s work across several supports and formats, including newsletters and publications that were independent of the CAYC, such as Héxagono 71, the magazine published by Edgardo Antonio Vigo. This led to a greater circulation of images on a broader scale through the CAYC’s campaigns to promote its various initiatives in other parts of the world.
The representation of the human figure has been a constant in the work of Juan Carlos Gómez (b. 1941) since his early days in the 1960s when he embraced a Pop aesthetic in his paintings of everyday people. His later works, produced in the 1970s, depict strange, threatening environments that suggest a certain Surrealist influence. In 1971, Gómez showed his work at the 7th Paris Biennale and at From figuration art to sistems art in argentina [sic], the exhibition organized by the CAYC at the Camden Arts Center in London. In 1974 his work was included in the CAYC’s submission to the 10th Sigma Festival in Bordeaux, France, (GT-460 [doc. no. 1476859]) and was selected to participate in the Premio Marcelo De Ridder at the MNBA in Buenos Aires.
