"Ornament and Memory" exhibition: Alicia Díaz Rinaldi engages in dialogue with Tamburini's architecture

The wonderful and well-restored Cordoban architecture of the Tamburini Palace combines perfectly with this series Ornament and Memory by Alicia Díaz Rinaldi , where she explores its relationship with a certain archaeology of history between our country at the end of the 19th century and the European architecture that was built for important projects. These are 13 works – including drawings, engravings, collages and paintings – curated by Leonardo Gotleyb , which dynamize the palatial structure with an effective way of presenting them using plates and some elements cut in volume, alongside production pieces such as blocks used for his works that allow us to realize his teaching inclination.

The tour plays an interesting role in deepening the visitor's gaze to reach another room where, indeed, the original plans by the Italian architect Tamburini are found.

The anecdote is that the remembered critic and manager Irma de Arestizábal suggested that she look at those plans to find a connection between the process of her visit to the territory of her ancestors and Alicia's need to exchange questions of context in her production .

Francesco Tamburini (1846, Italy – 1890 Buenos Aires), author of the historic palace where Bancor's Head Office now operates , was invited by Julio A. Roca to participate in the design of the Casa Rosada and the Teatro Colón, among other palaces.

Although some of his designs underwent modifications after construction began, the bank's plan used a very unique system of exchange between two worlds : the aesthetic repertoire of reinterpreted neoclassical architecture and a series of nods to works financed by the same bank that allowed the development of a thriving province in the late 1800s.

Alicia Díaz Rinaldi is a renowned Argentine artist with an extensive career, a teacher and innovator in the field of printmaking . In 1967, she traveled to Brazil and began her studies in printmaking at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, on a scholarship from the Argentine Embassy. Her passion had begun two years earlier, taking classes with Delia Cugat in the Almagro studio they shared.

In 1970 he returned to the country to continue researching engraving techniques . His works from that period reflect a part of the real environment with titles such as "The Candidate", "The Madman", "The Vicar" or "The Impostor" in 1976, a pivotal year politically speaking, themes that have always remained in the critical eye of engravers historically but that Díaz Rinaldi revitalized, incorporating the cut added to colored areas with other neutral ones, works that can be read in a pictorial key.

In the 1980s, there was a technical renewal in engraving associated with the idea of experimentation, together with Matilde Marín, Olga Billoir, Mabel Eli, Zulema Maza and Graciela Zar, they co-founded Grupo 6 in 1984. In the prologue to the book Alicia Díaz Rinaldi, Original y múltiple published in 2022, Marín explains: "During this period in the country, many artists sought strategies to break down the barriers between art and life , finding that the horizon of engraving in Argentina could be nourished by proposals that flew over the rigid idea with which it was viewed. In some way, the energy and spirit of the 60s were recaptured in the 80s."

The idea of the group also evolved by giving each member complete freedom over their own aesthetic . What fundamentally united them was breaking down the structures of the plane by using innovative resources and diverse aesthetics. The group was active until 1990, a period in which techniques were disseminated in open workshops, from the group's inaugural exhibition in 1985 at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, the Eduardo Sívori, the Recoleta Cultural Center in 1986, the Valparaíso Biennial in 1987, and the Puerto Rico Biennial the following year.

The collagraph technique was another innovation that allowed for freer experimentation, and the artist toured the country teaching the technique, also in Paraguay and Chile. In 1989, she won the Grand Prize of Honor at the 25th National Salon with the work "Erasmo," and there she began her production, which integrates the fragment using numerous references to iconic paintings from art history.

In the words of the late Argentine critic Rosa Faccaro, Alicia explores "visionary archaeological memory," rescuing "the perpetual and immobile hue of remembrance. In her work, place is marked as a possibility, and time has to do with the modification, mutation, or transformation of a world in crisis."

It is clearly this interpretation that is so moving when we revisit the 1990s works, now located in a place they had never been before, in direct dialogue with that environment . The series induces us to see a scheme of recognizable structures, such as classical columns and capitals, but strained between the fragment and certain graphic symbols, such as arrows or dotted lines, with certain cut-out native fauna animals appearing to convey another kind of sign.

Some contain the vitality of the contrast between the plane of color and the white of the paper , while other large works approach a certain arrangement of the architectural plane, completed by a marked symmetry. They are also complemented by a rarely seen part of her work, which has the condiments of the subject matter, but transferred to that pictorial plane, which is beautifully modulated by her choice of color. Alicia has produced work on both plane and space, being a reference point for the interesting evolution in the field of so-called "artist books."

A beautiful portrait of Sara Facio is offered to the viewer and it is interesting to know the value of this generation that had an important impact on the history of Argentine art , since in 1992 a group of artists made up of Alicia herself along with Diana Dowek, María Elena Walsh, Ana Eckel and Hernán Dompé, among others, were invited to documenta Kassel 9 with an exhibition entitled "The Other Side".

With artistic direction by Belgian Jan Hoet, who chose the motto "From body to body, to bodies," it was one of the first attempts to broaden the Eurocentric vision of contemporary art from Germany.

The Paraguayan critic Ticio Escobar described her clearly in a text: " She does archaeology in her own way: she collects remnants of history, she cites some fleeting moment that has already been cited and forgotten many times . With these scraps she reassembles another whole: it is a collage always condemned to the broken form of memory, which sediments different times and assembles contrary dimensions. Rigorous work that ends up opening it to a strange place governed by the pure laws of the image, by the implacable logic of the graphic sign."

Ornament and Memory. Alicia Díaz Rinaldi and Francisco Tamburini, a foundational dialogue at the Palacio Tamburini / Bancor (San Jerónimo 166, Córdoba) with free admission Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.