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 a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Mercedes Esteves (1939–2009) started working in the 1960s, at a time when experimental approaches to artistic materials and practices were redefining and expanding the concept of art. In 1967 she took part in Todo es amor, the happening that was organized at the Galería del Mar and the Galería Lirolay. Among other activities during that year she participated in the Semana del Arte Avanzado en la Argentina, exhibiting her work at the Galería Ronald Lambert and at Estructuras Primarias II, the exhibition curated by Glusberg at the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina. In 1969 she settled in Buenos Aires where she, Inés Gross, and the filmmaker Adolfo Bronowski started the Grupo Frontera; it wasn’t long before Carlos Espartaco also joined the group. Later that year they produced El hombre come, an audiovisual work they showed at Argentina Inter-medios, an event featuring electronic music, theater, and experimental films at the Teatro Ópera in Buenos Aires that was organized by the recently created CAYC for the purpose of enriching viewers’ perceptions. Shortly after that, the group presented Especta (1969), which was very influential owing to the group’s invitation to participate in the international exhibition Information (1970), one of the first overviews of Conceptual art, curated by Kynaston McShine, at MoMA in New York. After the dissolution of Grupo Frontera, the multimedia artist participated in the activities organized by the CAYC. She and Espartaco showed their work at CAYC al aire libre. Arte e ideología: their Puesta en lengua de la obra de arte (1972) consisted of printed sheets that drew on history, poetry, philosophy, and semiotics to review the theoretical foundations of contemporary art.
This interest in theoretical matters was apparent once again in her installation Ojo de señuelo. 24 rasgos para una representación, which was exhibited in September 1973. In an article published in the newsletter, Esteves discusses the structure, which consists of twenty-four boxes containing twenty-four masks, and reflects on the subject/object relationships that could be derived from the signifier máscara (mask): “Mask/unmask, veil/unveil, concave/convex: these are adjectival derivatives associated with the signifier matrix (mask) that is conceived as a screen where the subject of the representation is outside and the object in the visible field is the restructuring gaze of an entirely different symbolic possibility.”
