Bruno Juliano

During this residency, I am interested in talking to the teams or individuals at the Museo Moderno involved in exhibitions, accessibility, education, and inventory and restoration, in order to share and expand on the projects we are carrying out in our current research and extension work at the Faculty of Arts of the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán.

With the aim of guiding this discussion, I will put forward a concrete case based on a new finding. Work No. 163, by Raúl Lozza, is an oil painting on wood from 1948, which belongs to the Faculty’s collection. This piece was completed around the same time as Work No. 171, which is part of the Museo Moderno’s collection, dated that same year. This proximity, not only in temporal but also in material and compositional terms, allows for three areas of exploration. 

First, the focus will be placed on the state of Work No. 163 and its possible restoration. Based on a preliminary diagnosis, we realised that the artwork required attention. Following the work of Pino Monkes – Head of Conservation at the Museo Moderno – and his vision of conservation outlined in the book Bajo la superficie. Siete diálogos sobre la materialidad en la abstracción argentina (Colección Despierta del Moderno, 2023), I propose to analyse this with him or with members of his team.

The second area of work will focus on abstraction in Argentina and especially in Tucumán. In my doctoral thesis, I explored the beginning of abstraction in Tucumán using a painting from Timoteo Eduardo Navarro’s puddle series, produced in the early 1960s, in order to rethink the assumed superiority that classical art historiography ascribed to figurative art during the same period in our province. Lozza’s work, and its arrival and influence on Tucumán’s artistic production, challenges us to work on the tension surrounding geometric abstraction in the northwestern provinces of Argentina, vis-à-vis Buenos Aires and other regions of the country, and Latin America as a whole. In this respect, the approach of María Amalia García – who introduces Monkes’ book – on abstraction in Argentina and Brazil and the concrete art movement constitutes a key reference, linking back to the Museo Moderno’s collection and its exhibitions, among them Arte no figurativo [Non-Figurative Art] (1960), Abstractos informales y geométricos [Informal and Geometrical Abstraction] (1991), and Vida abstracta [Life in the Abstract] (2022-2023).

Finally, I am driven by a particular interest in images and surfaces as a way of reaching the places where memory survives. At the same time, I am interested in considering political image from the perspective of its materiality, which allows for the observer’s touch and the manipulation of their supportive materials, whichare not only visual but also haptic.