Roberto Aizenberg: Argentina's visual alchemist: this master surrealist painted provocative works that often reflected his personal struggle and despair while conveying a flesh, innocent vision.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

Solitary, geometric towers stand umber hued against an airy two-toned landscape, humorous headless figures, oddly costumed, are erect, even formal, against the nothingness. Light and space seem only to serve an overwhelming sense of solitude, of exile. Although he died nearly a decade ago, the mysterious towers, landscapes, and personages of Roberto Aizenberg, Argentina's leading surrealist, have lived on as "models of infinity," in the words of critic Noe Jitrik. In late 2001, the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires hosted a massive retrospective exhibition of his work and other recent shows outside the country have paid homage to this singular artist.

Surrealism emerged during the twenties, propelled by the madness of World War I as well as Freud's theories regarding dreams and the subconscious. Its proponents strove to escape the control of reason and celebrate that state of grace that belongs to childhood. They also attempted to rehabilitate superstition and magic, especially in Hermetic terms. At first it was largely a European phenomenon driven by the ideas of Breton, Picasso, De Chirico, and Dali, also Eluard, Miro, Magritte, and Bunuel, but with World War II the movement extended its reach to Mexico and the United States, as well as the countries of the Southern Cone. Best known among the Chileans was Roberto Matta, who trained as an architect in Santiago and then caught the surrealist bug while living in Paris.

Aizenberg's origins, modest and provincial, in no way pointed toward an artistic career, and least of all the subversion and provocation inherent in surrealism. He was born in 1911 in the little town of La Federal in the province of Entre Rios, the youngest of three sons. His father, Aaron, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Josefma Freilij, was a local schoolteacher. When he was twelve, the family moved to the capital, where Bobby (as he was always called by family members and friends) enrolled in the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. As an adolescent he was timid and introverted but took up drawing as a means to express his repressed feelings. He also tried his hand at painting, on pieces of sheeting: first a copy of a work by Kandinsky, then a replica of surrealist imagery reminiscent of Tanguy. At age twenty he enrolled in the Facultad de Arquitectura at the Universidad National de Buenos Aires. In his free time he frequented art galleries, where he discovered the work of Antonio Berni and surrealist painter Juan Batlle Planas. In 1975, in an interview published in Crisis, he said of the latter artist, "I identified deeply with him, as when one thinks, 'this is what I want to do,' and tries to force the hand to do it, in order to own it. In a way, I felt that the work was mine, done by someone else's hand but that it belonged to me, and that he had 'stolen' it from me. This is how it was to study with the master, a way to recover what belongs to oneself."

By chance Aizenberg's poet uncle, Isaac, knew Jose Planas Casas, the draftsman and printmaking uncle of Batlle Planas, and through this connection young Aizenberg began an apprenticeship with "mi maestro," as he always called him. In the Crisis interview, Aizenberg says, "Batlle was the most important person that I have ever known, the one who taught me how to think in the most profound sense of the word."

Like many of his European brethren, Batlle preached automatismo, art ruled by pure chance, the generation of images that flowed through the medium of the artist. The painter or draftsman did not control the outcome, but rather it was the image that took the artist by the hand to reveal itself. In another interview (Humor, 1983), Aizenberg defined his automatismo as "something that has to do with the possibility of disengaging, of...