Carlos Aitor Castillo describes the I Salón de Arte Abstracto as an “appealing novelty” that provides an opportunity to judge the Peruvian response to the abstract movement. He rates it as a rather poor one, referring to the participating artists as “improvisers” who, in his opinion, are “impotent and frustrated.” Despite the freedom it seems to offer, he thinks abstraction “is a sort of no-man’s land, ripe for all kinds of trickery.” He believes that most artists are only trying to “be up to date,” though he excludes those for whom abstraction is part of an ongoing evolution. Castillo tries to provide “an analysis of values,” but is unimpressed by most of the painters, with the exception of Benjamín Moncloa and Fernando de Szyszlo. He explains that the latter “is figurative” in his expression of his personal world, “real,” and “alive.” Castillo also discusses Moncloa’s “search for an American form of expression” through a pre-Colombian language based on symbols.

This is the painter and critic Carlos Aitor Castillo’s review of the I Salón de Arte Abstracto, the exhibition held in Lima in January 1958. 

In Peru, the 1950s spawned a departure from the narrow field of (solitary and intimist) experimentation characterized by the few examples of non-figurative painting produced in the very late 1940s by the abstract pioneering work of Juan Barreto (1913–91), Juan Manuel de la Colina (b. 1917), Antonino Espinosa Saldaña (1893–1969), and Enrique Kleiser (1905–77). Though the latter’s exhibition, in 1950, was the first to show works of this kind in Peru, it fell to a new generation of artists to wage the decisive battle on behalf of abstract art. The success enjoyed by the painter Fernando de Szyszlo (b. 1925)—who took the prize at the III Salón Moncloa in Lima in October 1955—thus injected the values of abstraction into the conversation after a couple of years of bitter debate concerning its relevance in Peru [on the subject of the III Salón Moncloa, see the following article in the ICAA digital archive, “En blanca y negra,” by Luis Miró Quesada Garland (doc. no. 859754)]. The I Salón de Arte Abstracto was unquestionably even more important. This event, organized by the painters Eduardo Moll (b. 1929) and Benjamín Moncloa (b. 1927) at the Museo de Arte de Lima in January 1958, was the first group exhibition of non-figurative art ever held in Peru. The high number of participants (a total of thirty) included the most talented local young artists [“I Salón de Arte Abstracto” (anonymous) (doc. no.  1143441)]. Despite the generally unenthusiastic reviews of the exhibition published by the writer Sebastián Salazar Bondy (1924–64) [“Visita al Salón de Arte Abstracto,” by Bondy (doc. no. 1137318)] and the painter Carlos Aitor Castillo (1913–2000), the Salon was already predicting that local artists would be converting to non-figurative languages in the following decade. There were, of course, those who were initially opposed to that possibility, including Castillo [see also the following documents: “Crónica de arte: I Salón de Arte Abstracto,” by Moll (doc. no. 1137359); and “Primer Salón de Arte Abstracto,” by Garland (doc. no. 1137215)].