Uruguayan art, which had been under the spell of an academicist-inspired naturalism during the nineteenth century, then flirted with a form of landscape painting focused on native environments favored by the planismo movement in the early twentieth century, and had experienced its first destabilizing impact caused by the arrival of Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949) in 1934, was then impacted once again in the early 1950s by the arrival of concrete art and geometric abstraction. Against that background, the emergence of the Dibujazo movement in the 1960s (along with a new “informalist” style of painting) prompted another shift, this time toward the new generation of young draftsmen’s neo-realism and “urgentista” expressionism. The Dibujazo generation thus created works that reflected their social awareness and their reactions to the shanty towns that were springing up on the outskirts of the capital city of Montevideo in the mid-1960s. Their works, on the whole, reported on Uruguay’s new style of socio-political violence and launched satirical attacks on the mass media. Seen from a broader perspective, this wave of creativity was fired by the same spirit of rebellion against tradition that was being expressed in various different forms all over the world.
The following artists stand out as harbingers of the Dibujazo movement: Nelson Ramos (1932–2006), who insisted that drawing was just as important as painting; Jorge Páez Vilaró (1922–94), who embraced drawing as his medium and took it to unusual heights in his mural works; Teresa Vila (1931–2009), who began working in a free figuration style and then moved on to focus on politically-tinged conceptualism, happenings, and performance art; Magali Herrera (1914–92), whose work was reminiscent of Art Brut; Eugenio Darnet (1929–2015), whose monstrous figuration was a metaphor for violence; Eduardo Fornasari (b. 1946), Marta Restuccia (b. 1937), and Nelson Avdalov (b. 1947), who described their visual art work as “visceral;” Domingo Ferreira (b. 1940), who was mainly known as an illustrator; and Beatriz Battione (b. 1949), among many others.
The Dibujazo visual art movement became established in the late 1960s; it contributed to the heyday of drawing in Uruguay, a trend that was repeated in several other countries in Latin America. In 1975, during the Uruguayan military dictatorship, the authorities canceled the Escarabajo de Oro awards for best artists and put several draftsmen in jail. As a result, many artists left the country and the movement was much diminished. During the 1960s a number of institutions—the Feria Nacional de Libros y Grabados, the Artes Gráficas events organized by the Club de Grabado, Museo de Arte Americano de Maldonado, Galería U, Galería A, Galería Palacio Salvo—were supportive of drawing and the graphic arts in general. The Dibujazo was not just a collection of works or a group of artists; nor was it a period that was strictly defined by a certain technique, much less by a particular style. It was more of a phenomenon that could be described as a form of “cultural synergy,” the result of a confluence of many different factors that defy separation.
