African perceptions of an Argentine master.

• Author: Casciero, Annick Sanjurjo
• Position: ART

For more than forty years, Argentine artist Eduardo Mac Entyre has been creating a universe of curved lines, circles, and circumferences. On a solid--usually dark--background, they meet and separate, open and close, overlap, and move away from each other, or crash together with a sudden impact that produces its own movement and luminous energy. The lines might grow in volume or acquire more curves, but they still glide over the solid background, cross each other, and weave together, carrying a dynamic all their own. Each composition is a universe whose energy needs are supplied by its own orderly geometry. It is also a self-sufficient universe in terms of content, since it doesn't attempt to imitate external reality, tell a story, or reproduce a scene from real life. It is a reflection of a kind of intellectual contemplation that evokes and leads the way to spirituality.

Art conceived in ties way is intelligent action complemented by the sensitivity of the artist. It is the search for beauty for beauty's sake, the search for a new reality with its own forms and colors. It "leaves the observer free to work actively with these elements using his own imagination," says Mac Entyre, co-founder in 1960 of the Arte Generativo movement. "That's when art, which is shaped with the beautiful power of human freedom, together with our sensitivity and our intelligence, can with a power that is similar to that of nature itself--give birth to manifestations of life, vibration, beauty and harmony, power and energy, simply by combining the most simple--and therefore the purest--forms."

Adhering to these basic artistic principles, Mac Entyre has responded to a challenge to enter a world very different from his own, the world of black African ancestral culture. He does this by transferring to Iris paintings the images that flow from pieces of his rich collection of African art--masks, ritual statuettes, male and female figures, fetishes, doors, and other objects. "What interested me was their form," says Mac Entyre, who has managed to capture their most essential elements. But it wasn't just a matter of extracting forms; he also had to penetrate their mystery and understand their reason for being, their essence.

In this way he began to build a world that was different, but intimately connected to, that of the figures before him. Faithful to his style of pure and simple abstract geometry, he didn't reproduce the figure--a fetish, mask, or statuette--just as it was; he gave it another dimension. He didn't create the visible; he created the invisible--the spell, the magic that was symbolically attributed to it in its original culture.

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