This article reviews the exhibition La Conquista (Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta, March 1992). It argues that “the response of the forty participating artists are varied. There is no unifying artistic trend.” It gives a detailed description of the works presented by Marcia Schvarts, Duilio Pierri, Juan Astica, Eduardo Estupia, Alfredo Portillos, Anahí Cáceres, Oscar Smoje, Juan Manuel Lima, José Garófalo and Daniel Ontiveros, Norberto Gómez, Alberto Heredia, Omar Schiliro, Gumier-Maier, José Luis Gestro, Osvaldo Quintero, Alejandro Kuropatwa, Gabriel González-Suárez, Daniel García and, especially, of Marcelo Pombo’s installation, which is considered as “one of the best in this exhibition.” The author, Laura Batiks, points out that, parting from “a mass media iconography—the advertising for a brand of rice—Pombo produces an analytical operation where the precision of an idea is taken to its final consequences in order to formulate an ironic discourse about the fascination of branding and the discovery of America as a business.”

Laura Batkis, historian, art critic, and curator, has written in various national and international publications. At the time of the publication of this article (1992) she was writing many of the forewords to the exhibition catalogs sponsored by Galería Ruth Benzacar.

This article shows the visibility that the “artistas del Rojas” began to acquire between 1991 and 1992, artists such as Marcelo Pombo, Jorge Gumier-Maier, and Omar Schiliro; that is, those whom the Galería del Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas—a fringe exhibition space within the Buenos Aires art scene during its beginnings—sponsored between 1989 and the first years of the following decade. This exhibition presents them, along with already established artists with a long career, such as Marcia Schvartz, Alfredo Portillos, Alberto Heredia, Norberto Gómez, and Eduardo Estupia.

The reference to poetics of the past, such as Pop art, minimalism, Concrete art (under extremely personal reformulations), besides elements of kitsch, have helped to characterize the resources of expression of such artists. Toward the end of the decade, the artists who made up “el grupo del Rojas” were grouped, in a generic manner, as the representatives of the “1990s Argentinean art.”