In this text, Luis Felipe Noé explains his theory that the shared impulse that defines Latin American painting is its preoccupation with “inventing history.” He argues that this impulse is a direct result of Latin American artists’ experience of painting in a context in which there is a discernable lack of cultural history. Noé lays the groundwork for his argument by distinguishing how painting has historically developed in the centers versus the peripheries: In the U.S., painting has tended to progressively reduce itself to its most literal pictorial elements, while in Latin America, it has tended to act as a passive consumer of culture exported from the center. This has resulted, he explains, in a situation in which Latin American artists have looked to their own history determined to locate a cultural history of their own. Artists have found “historical” sources in pre-Columbian and Baroque art, as well as in the period of Independence. In all cases, Latin American artists’ desire of a come back to these historical periods mirrors their desire to recreate a fictional cultural history. Noé declares that a radical change occurred in Latin America during the late- 1960s and early- ‘70s when the goals of the artistic avant-garde and the political avant-garde merged. But, he states concluding, during the past ten years (the 1970s), painting has largely failed in the face of the Latin American dictatorships that have ruled the era.

The Argentinean artist and critic Luis Felipe Noé (b. 1933) wrote this text as part of a collection of essays on Latin American art and identity published in 1982 in Mexico City. Noé, like many of his peers, is preoccupied with theorizing about contemporary and modern artists’ nexus to such “historical” sources as pre-Columbian and Baroque art. It is notable, though, how his way of characterizing artists’ relationships to these periods differs from how most art historians and critics traced their influence via forms and subjects. Instead, Noé argues that artists learn ways of perceiving from these periods: [the Chilean born and Europe-based] Roberto Matta (1911-2002), he explains, assumes a similar way of perceiving as the pre-Columbian ability to synthesize the “magical” and “symbolic”; baroque art, on the other hand, is evidence of Latin American artists’ inability to synthesize culture and nature in the face of the excessive character of nature in the region. Noé is clearly most interested in the artist as someone who perceives the world around him and translates these perceptions into a language of symbols and images; he also sees painting as a bourgeois art that is wearing itself out. Art, for him, is a language of symbols, and, in this vein, he quotes as sources the leading cultural and media theorists of the 1960s and ‘70s, such as Susan Sontag, Raymond Williams, and Marshall McLuhan. Noé also sees conceptual art and literature as viable responses to both the painting and politics of Latin America during the 1970s, when, as he notes, the failures of painting became clear during a period of harsh dictatorships. ([Uruguayan citizen and New York-based] Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937) is another artist and critic Noé cites at length in the closing passages of the essay.)