Mellado, J[usto Pastor] (Text) and Gonzalo Díaz (art).

[ESCENA DE AVANZADA CHILENA – LATIN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE] Texto auxiliar para la lectura del cuadro sin título presentado por G. Díaz en Galería Visuala [Auxiliary text for the reading of the untitled painting presented by G. Díaz at Galería Visuala].

Santiago de Chile: Visuala Galería, 1985. Quarto (33 × 21.6 cm). Original side-stapled illustrated wrappers; one blank leaf and [17] leaves of reproduced typescript to rectos, printed on variously colored stock. Light crease to upper left corner of front wrapper; else very good. Item #54419

Rare mimeographed publication on the motif of the toucan in a painting by Gonzalo Díaz Cuevas (born 1947), one of the leading Chilean conceptual artists. Together with Nelly Ricard, Eugenio Dittborn, Lotty Rosenfeld, Carlos Altamirano and Carlos Leppe, he was one of the initiators of the “Escena de Avanzada”. Remarkably, Díaz only turned to installation, conceptual art, and pop art after the military coup. Prior to this, he used the medium of painting to explore the themes of classical literature, mythology, and poetry. This change in his work went hand in hand with a critical examination of the genre of representational painting itself. In his work “Historia sentimental de la pintura chilena”, he used a banal advertising motif that was very well known in Chile at the time, thus parodying the painterly heritage to which he had been committed up to that point using the means of Pop Art. Díaz thus became a central figure in a critical approach to painting, but then turned entirely to installation. He exhibited his works at Galería Época, among others, where Catalina Parra showed her “Imbunches” works and curated a Vostell exhibition together with the V.I.S.U.A.L. group, which included Eugenio Dittborn and Ronald Kay. International prominence came to Díaz not least through his participation at Documenta 12 in Kassel.

Alongside Nelly Richard, the art critic and curator Justo Pastor Mellado is one of the most important chroniclers of the "Escena de Avanzada" (a term coined by Richard). Mellado emphasized in this movement of the Chilean avant-garde less the attitude of protest against the prevailing conditions in Chile than the tendency towards the internationalization of Chilean art, which was forced by the "Escena de Avanzada". For Mellado, the crisis in painting was one of the most important commonalities of the Chilean avant-gardes after the military coup. (Cf. Entries on the website of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on Documents of Latin American and Latino Art; the present document is not available there.)

As of June 2024, OCLC show two two copies worldwide, none in North America.

Price: €1,600.00

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