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.
Armando Durante (1934–1997) started his art career in Buenos Aires, where he won the Instituto di Tella’s National and International Prizes in 1965, then went on to be acknowledged for his exhibition Materiales, nuevas técnicas, nuevas expresiones (1968, MNBA). He moved to Paris where he encountered the works of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), a group that was founded in 1960 and led by two Argentineans, Julio Le Parc and Horacio García Rossi. Durante joined Le Parc and other European artists to explore the possibilities of movement and luminous and chromatic effects in optical and Kinetic works of art, some of which were designed to encourage viewer participation.
Durante returned to Argentina in 1975, when the CAYC organized a solo exhibition of his works. He found Buenos Aires to be in a state of social and political unrest as a result of the military coup d’état that lasted almost a decade (1976–85). And, in June 1975, the “Rodrigazo,” a plan for economic reform, prompted a sharp devaluation of the Argentinean currency. Against this backdrop, Durante’s exhibition called for a reflection on the value of change in contemporary culture, a proposal that was in line with the GRAV’s sociological interests. The exhibition consisted of a collection of portraits of celebrities—the Pope, presidents, actors, sports figures, musicians—arranged in a structure that viewers could modify, playing with the possibilities of change and values within the confines of the piece.
After living in Argentina for twenty years, Durante decided to return to Europe. He settled permanently in Spain, where he reinvented his conceptual language and experimented with screenprinting.