The director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires [Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art], Hugo Parpagnoli writes about the selection criteria and the organization of the Argentinean painting exhibition in Caracas (1963), a proposal in eight segments. In the first one, named “Generación” [Generation], he groups those who welcomed the Cubist storm: Ramón Gómez-Cornet, Emilio Pettorutti, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, and Miguel C. Victorica as “modern for the academia and academics for the revolution.” In the second, “Escuela,” [School], he affirms the individual character, more than the common denomination of the “Escuela de París” [The Paris School]. In the following sector, “Lenguaje” [Language], Parpagnoli groups artists focused on form and color as a language in painting (Leopoldo Presas, Raúl Russo, Luis Seoane). The fourth sector, “Solos” [Soloists], groups several young artists in a contrasting manner, as an expression of diverse aesthetic needs (among them, Julio Barragán, Luis Barragán, Luis Fernando Benedit, Aníbal B. Carreño, Nicolás García-Uriburu, and Kenneth Kemble). The following “Conquista” [Conquest] represents the triumph of the non-figurative, from the Concrete to Informalism. In the sixth, “Fidelidad” [Fidelity], he exhibits those who stayed faithful to geometry (among others, Ary Brizzi, Miguel Angel Vidal, Luis Tomasello, and Carlos Silva). The seventh sector, “Mundos” [Worlds], congregates those artists that work with the elements of reality, searching to express a new world, albeit with very diverse characteristics; for example, Roberto Aizenberg and Estanislao Guzmán Loza. The last one, “Actitud” [Attitude], includes the members of the Otra Figuración [Another Figuration], which he defined as those that assume chaos.

Hugo Parpagnoli, art critic and director of the Museo de Arte Moderno [Museum of Modern Arts] in Buenos Aires, was the organizer of this important exhibition, which contributed to the spread of Argentinean art in Latin America. At the time, the city of Caracas was going through a process of modernization and was under a democratic government, a situation that was similar to what happened in Argentina with the initiation of democratization, retaken after a brief lapse into a military government. This document points out the complexity of the institutional networks of the 1960s in the program for disseminating modern Argentinean art, incorporating Caracas into the most well known cultural policies, along with São Paulo, Paris, and New York. In 1963, the exhibition L’art argentin actuel [The Current Argentinean Art] in the Musée d’art moderne in Paris (with Gyula Kosice (1924–2016) as commissioner, with Jorge Romero-Brest, Julio E. Payró, and Héctor Basaldúa in charge of the selection). Hugo Parpagnoli selected the works of art himself for Buenos Aires 64, exhibited in the Pepsi-Cola showroom in New York facilities, with the main artists of the Geometric, Pop Art, and object-based art tendencies. This exhibition, in Caracas, presents a reading of Argentinean art of the 20th century from the perspective of an increasing modernization.