Centripetal Force

Emilio Pettoruti attended art school in the city of La Plata and practiced his drawing technique during visits to the Museo de Historia Natural in that city. He traveled to Italy in 1913, exploring its cities and getting training in different artistic techniques, but chiefly painting and mosaic making. In Florence, where passionate discussions were underway on what modern life in large cities implied for art and culture, he became active in futurism, incorporating that movement’s ideas about motion into his work. At that time, Pettoruti produced a series of drawings, some in charcoal and others in pencil. In them, he focused on the tensions between forms, casting aside the experimentation with color part and parcel of oil painting, the technique he used in other works from the same period. The lines and spiral shapes in these charcoal drawings with translucent planes are organized around a center that seems to draw them in. The work "Forze centripete" is from that period—a distinctive moment in Pettoruti’s production and in the history of Argentine and greater Latin American art.