Luis Felipe Noé (Buenos Aires, 1933) began his studies with the painter Horacio Butler at the beginning of the 1950s, mounting his first exhibition in 1959. In 1961 he had a group exhibition as Otra Figuración [Another Figuration] at the Galería Peuser in conjunction with Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció and Jorge de la Vega. The group exhibited together until 1965. Noé stood out among the group due to his theoretical reflections on art in contemporary society. Among his central tenets was the idea of “chaos as structure” of a work. Notable among his publications are Antiestética [Anti-aesthetic] (Buenos Aires: Editorial Van Riel, 1965) and Una sociedad colonial avanzada [An Advanced Colonial Society] (Buenos Aires: Editorial La Flor, 1971).
A substantial renewal in the visual arts took place in Argentina during the second half of the 1950s. This process mandated an update of the understanding of visual language within art criticism. The present document is part of a series that reassembles the body of art criticism written by Noé in 1956. The documents were published in the newspaper El Mundo [The World] (published between 1928 and 1967, it was the first newspaper presented in tabloid format in Argentina, and enjoyed popularity due to its illustrated stories). Noé’s visual arts education took place, from the beginning of the 1950s, in the workshop of figurative artist Horacio Butler, who himself had been a member of the innovative group of the 1930s Paris.
In this document Noé critiques the work of his former teacher as an example of the theoretical resolution of the problems concerning the visual arts, a central aspect of Noé’s work in the 1960s.
