The Rebellion of Form

Face lifted to the sky, La portadora de la palabra [The Word Bearer] holds Summa by Thomas Aquinas against her chest while raising her palm in a gesture both cautionary and revealing. Embedded in her flesh, in matter itself, she bears the markings of history, the intensity of memory. Perhaps, because as Hannah Arendt points out, “the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming,” this contemporary koré alerts us solemnly to possible futures. Juan Carlos Distéfano’s art is, thus, a reflection on the human condition. In it, the body/bodies are a privileged terrain of experience. His figures take flight or huddle in tensions and falls, altering their relationship with space and matter. In his Kinderspelen, Distéfano seems to have admitted the density of bodies (in history?) as the players in that childhood re-lived latch onto the earth and shatter, appropriating the extended space, designing playgrounds on wastelands while the real—firearms—is embodied in matter.
Distéfano’s first exhibition was held in the sixties; his works, at that time, were called “current expressions that exceed the limits of his discipline.” He was immediately selected to participate in the IX São Pablo Biennial, where some of his works was censored for “moral” reasons; it was ultimately exhibited only because other artists protested in solidarity. His works formed part of the Latin American art scene at historical moments characterized by what Argentine philosopher Oscar Terán has called the four souls of the period: “the nonsense soul of Beckett, the Kennedy soul of the Alliance for Progress, the Lennon soul of flower power, the Che Guevara soul of revolutionary uprising.” Thus, from the transformative illusions of sixties and seventies, followed by one of the bloodiest periods in Argentine history beginning in 1976 and the later return of democracy in 1984, Distéfano’s art has constantly engaged questions of history and memory. Argentine history and memory, most certainly, but we know as well that the question of trauma—the holocaust being the universal measure of historic trauma—is precisely the point where the peoples of the world recognize one another and/or activate, on the basis of art, their own experiences, contaminating that original reference that comes to act as metaphor for other historical traumas and the memories thereof. Perhaps, returning to Arendt, they do this to activate the operations that enable engagement with the future.

María Teresa Constantin