Luis Felipe Noé writes that the work of the Spanish artist Antonio Clavé tends to expand, leaving the frame in order to develop its vitality, thus making the history of art present. In Noé’s opinion, Clavé’s work is dominated by the concept of “otherness”. Beyond this, the critic analyzes an exhibition of landscapes by the Argentinean painter Miguel Diomede, ranging from the intimate portraits to still-life. He also formally critiques the figurative paintings of Florencio Garavaglia from the point of view of an objective treatment of the represented subjects matters.

Luis Felipe Noé (Buenos Aires, 1933) initially studied art with the painter Horacio Butler in the early 1950s. In 1961, he exhibited at Galería Peuser together with Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció, and Jorge de la Vega, a group that became known as Otra Figuración [Other Figuration]. They exhibited as a group until 1965. Noé stood out among the others for his theoretical reflections on art in contemporary society. Among his concepts, the idea of "chaos" as the structure of an artwork was a central theme. Among his books, Antiestética [Anti-aesthetics] (Buenos Aires, Editorial Van Riel, 1965) and Una sociedad colonial avanzada [An Advanced Colonial Society] (Buenos Aires, Editorial La Flor, 1971) are particularly important. In the second half of the 1950s Argentina there was a substantial renewal in the visual arts. This process required an updating of the understanding of artistic languages within the realm of art criticism. The present document was part of a series of art criticism brought together by Noé in 1956. These articles were published in the newspaper El Mundo (in print between 1928 and 1967; El Mundo was one of the first tabloid-format publications in Argentina, very popular for its comic strips). In the early 1950s, Noé studied art in the studio of Horacio Butler, a figurative artist active in the 1930s art scene by means of the so-called Group of Paris.

This document is a good example of how Noé assesses the formal qualities of an artwork.