Artwork Review

Oscar Meraldi’s constructivist artworks

A few months ago Oscar Meraldi presented his artworks at the International Hall of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. The invitation from the National Institute of Fine Arts is one of the highest distinctions that a foreign artist can receive from an official institution.

Although Oscar Meraldi was born in Uruguay, in our opinion he is not a foreigner or a stranger: someone who has lived among us for five years cannot be, nor who –in all orders– has been nurtured in “our America of Martian exegesis: our homeland from Bravo to Magellan, unified in the vein of Hispano-American culture.

Just like cubism was taken to Buenos Aires by Pettoruti in 1924, Joaquín Torres García spread constructivism in the late 1940s in the Plata region, particularly in Uruguay. This last reference is inevitable and necessary to penetrate the formative experience of Oscar Meraldi.

Modern painting at the international level was founded in Uruguay in the thirties with the contribution of Rafael Pérez Barradas and Pedro Figari –among the ones of greatest merit– but is the presence and fruitful work of Torres García in his native country, in 1945, when the Uruguayan school from which prestigious avant-garde artists have emerged is properly established, like Gonzalo Fonseca (in the foreground), Jorge Damiani, Manuel Espíndola Gómez, José Gamarra, Leonilda González, Jorge Nieto, Carlos Fossatti and many others that have been dealt with by American and European critics. Oscar Meraldi belongs to this generation.

It is important to remember that Torres García’s work has not only influenced the young generation of Uruguayan artists, it has also done so in plastic arts and architecture throughout the continent. Twenty two years after his death, at present his international recognition continues growing.

Oscar Meraldi is born and profitably collects in Montevideo the heritage of the River plate school: 15 years in painting and numerous exhibitions in various countries. He is one of the artists who successfully preserves the constructivist current, without this meaning that it lacks personal development and recreation. The retrospective of his work that is presented now is only a brief sample of the last three years of research –starting point of all rising creation– in which he exhibits (mostly) carefully studied geometric compositions.

It is through color that he reveals his constructivism: superimposed planes and volumes that force us to transfer spaces. Although he eludes the chromatic mechanism, the importance of color (Wessenheit) is capital (we insist) in the achievement of separateness or unity between “masses” and space within the reduced format that prevails in most of his paintings.

Constructivism in this Montevidean artist acquires a unique personality by including in the balanced geometry, varied textures (some delicate, others slightly hostile), but always right. Also in contrast to the geometric “requirement”, Meraldi avoids the sharp, precise profile of the line; he prefers to give greater relevance to the scale of textures that acrylic and its mixtures provide.

Kandinsky’s plastic ideal, expressed in Of the spiritual in art, in which “the world is no longer” but another, pure and independent, “that of the pure spirit” in Meraldi’s work takes on a new meaning, although with another sense: The rationalized geometry of constructivism is inoculated with the demystifying “virus” that threatens its formal “purity”. (The textures and the color that go beyond the profiles, is the “acid” that corrodes the intellectualized concept about cleanliness and the delimiting stroke of the line?) We say that in another sense, since in effect “that is no longer the world”… that of intellectual constructivism, Meraldi brings us closer to the field of sensory appreciation.

The sensory consideration to which it confronts us initially, is not completely so, since eventually “escape” symbols: elaborated propositions with which the painter wants us to perceive the vertigo of the world of our days. In our opinion, all the intellectual neutralization in which he wishes the spectator to be involved is for now the prolegomenon that augurs new and fortunate investigations.

In the retrospective sequence we find the magnificent intraist sense of the utopian architectures of Walter Jonas. From this specific terrain, the “architecture” of most of Oscar Meraldi’s works also reminds us (within different parallels) Paul Klee’s extraordinary, designed “for no place, but beyond all, where sign and meaning are unified”.

Jorge Silva Izazaga