In conjunction with our booth at Madrid’s ARCO art fair, “Journey through Abstraction,” featuring work by Argentine artist César Paternosto created in the 80s and early 90s, Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. is pleased to present “Rhythm of the Line,” an exhibition showcasing a selection of paintings, works on paper, and sculpture which were created in the following decades.

César Paternosto’s works on view at ARCO were heavily influenced by the pre-Columbian ceramics, textiles, and stone sculptures which he encountered during his travels throughout Latin America. During these years, the artist infused his work with a color palette of sandy grays, ochres, and earthy red tones, while at the same time maintaining an understanding that, in the absence of ‘the written word,’ the function of color, the line, geometric designs, and archetypal gridded forms in pre-Columbian art held a symbolic function.

Paternosto’s later work in “Rhythm of the Line” continues to engage in a conversation between line, color, and space, while pushing this dialogue even further with certain formal innovations. On view are works from his series "Hilos de agua" (Water threads), white canvases with spare watercolor pencil lines that drip down the surface of the canvas in diluted colors. These lines are spaced in a manner resembling a form of vertical patterning, an almost rhythmic pulsating of color and blank space. In his later series, "Confluencias" (Confluences), the artist conflates the rhythmic alliterations of his earlier streaming lines with bisecting, orthogonal, and gridded lines. Instead of a blank canvas, he infuses his backgrounds with tones that are much more saturated than his original palette, this time ranging from vibrant red to deep Mediterranean blue.

“Rhythm of the Line” stands testament to the continuity of the formal elements which César Paternosto began to appropriate in the late 1970s through his travels in Latin America, and those which he has developed upon and continues to employ to this day. Through this exhibition being held in conjunction with our showing of Paternosto’s work at ARCO, we aim to create engagement and dialogue between the two, capturing the continuity and innovation of formal elements that have emerged in the later decades of the artist’s oeuvre.