Founded in 1984, the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas [Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center] became a cultural extension of the Universidad of Buenos Aires in which various events, such as courses, lectures, cinema encounters, etc. took place. Several years after its opening, in 1989, La Galería del Rojas [The Rojas Gallery] was created in the entrance hall directed by artist and art critic Jorge Gumier-Maier. A short time later, Magdalena Jitrik joined him as a collaborator. As an underground showroom for the Argentinean artistic milieu at the time, the center got public visibility between 1991–92. The artists from “el Rojas” began to be incorporated into the main agenda of key exhibition spaces, such as the ICI (Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana) [Institute of Iberoamerican Cooperation], the Centro Cultural de España [Cultural Center of Spain], and the Galería Ruth Benzacar. The reference to poetics from the past, like Pop, Minimal, Concrete Art (under very personal reformulations), joined with elements of kitsch, have served to characterize the expressive resources of those artists. Toward the end of the decade, the artists that integrated “el grupo del Rojas” were considered by and large as the representatives of the 1990s Argentinean Art.During the 1990s, the Espacio Giesso was one of the “alternative” exhibition spaces. Many young artists exhibited their works in that hall. Jorge Gumier Maier, Alfredo Londaibere, Benito Laren, Omar Schiliro formed what was called the “grupo de El Rojas” [The Rojas Group]; namely, those who the Galería del Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas [Gallery of the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center] hosted between the second half of 1989 and the early-1990s. This document is of great importance as a record of one of the most transcendental shows in which the artists belonging to The Rojas Group participated. Mainly because of the critical repercussion caused by the exhibition’s review written by Jorge López-Anaya for the newspaper La Nación [The Nation] (see: “El absurdo y la ficción en una notable muestra” [The absurd and the fiction in an outstanding show], August 1, 1992, document no. 768308). In that article, the author used the term “light” to describe the character of the works presented; a term indeed that generated, due to its possible connotations, numerous discussions and debates that decade within the Argentinean artistic milieu. Likewise, this document is also important if we consider that most of the exhibitions by The Rojas Group’s artists—whether they took place in the gallery, or in relatively similar spaces—at this early stage, lacked exhibition catalogues. In this sense, invitation cards are often one of the few recording materials that outlasted the shows.
