Untitled

Carmelo Arden Quin was one of the members of the editorial collective of Arturo. Revista de artes abstractas, published in the summer of 1944. Towards the end of the following year, he was part of the Movimiento de Arte Concreto-Invención (MACI), which organized two presentations in private residences that included poetry and exhibitions of paintings and sculptures as well as music and dance. Following the proposal that Rhod Rothfuss had formulated in the pages of Arturo, the photographic records of those first encounters already show some works with cut-out frames. It was an idea that aspired to break the orthogonality and to structure the frame according to the composition of the painting, in order to avoid the suggestion of continuity of the subject beyond the limits of that frame. This untitled work corresponds to his early production, which he called "primitive period". It features three geometric shapes painted in flat colors (green, yellow and orange) flanked by two elongated areas covered by a horizontally striped design. These small lateral areas provide a strong accent of color due to the juxtaposition of their contrasting tonalities; however, the composition retains balance due to the size relationships between the parts and the structuring by means of a partition separating the different areas.