An exhibition to decipher Alfredo Carracedo, an artist as meticulous as he is hidden.

Opening a new space in the San Telmo circuit, the Towpyha Gallery presents a series of never-before-exhibited works by artist Alfredo Carracedo (1927–2000), a member of Grupo Joven in its early days. A rebel and disbeliever in the system, his work was part of the exhibition Grupo Joven, art and contempt in the 1950s. that the Gallery's research team celebrated on this interesting project, developed in the 1950s in Buenos Aires and which remained open in the Recoleta Cultural Center for many months.

Founded by Víctor Magariños D. (1924-1993) together with Domingo Di Stefano (1926-2022), Osvaldo Lucentini and Héctor Álvarez on September 21, 1946, the Young Group channeled the searches of a young generation that not only distrusted art critics and museum directors, but also attempted a practice that would stimulate what would later be known as the formal vocabulary of the plastic arts , moving away from the system of representation in order to achieve an abstraction that took more into account innovation and abstract production.

In this exhibition, Alfredo Carracedo, in the shadow of abstraction, can be seen in his display of four decades of unpublished paintings and drawings that were kept safe in the home of one of Alfredo's sons. Along with countless meticulously crafted papers, a bias emerges that he maintained for 40 years in relation to teaching, at Cardenal Newman School beginning in 1959, and at San Juan Evangelista, La Salle, and Inmaculada Concepción, located in Lomas de Zamora, from 1967 until the early 1990s.

It is interesting to note that this is an investigation led by Chilean curators Marcela Astudillo and Federico Towpyha on a production space that was excluded from the general history of Argentine art, perhaps because some of its members were more relevant individually than others, as is the case of Eduardo Mac Entyre , Miguel Ángel Vidal or Víctor Magariños D.

The group remained with many of its colleagues who were dropping out of their training programs, while he completed his studies while giving up exhibiting work , but not participating as a spectator, perhaps convinced that radicalization wasn't among its basic precepts. The texts conceived by the collective, it should be noted, defined the 1950s and challenged the conventionality of the concept and its materiality.

The exhibition is spread over two floors and reveals Carracedo the artist's many creative activities, such as designing jewelry (his family owned a jewelry store), drawing abstract rugs for a manufacturer in the province of Buenos Aires who never managed to get his clients to choose his creations, files on his teaching practice (wonderful handmade technical files that defined the terms of his teaching: the point, the line, the shapes, the color and the support plane), family and colleague photos, and a facilitating idea that includes texts to decipher his attitude, his works, the story within his own story.

In 1949, he joined the Grupo Joven art collective. Three years later, he graduated from the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts and participated in the Arganat Ceramics exhibition at the Peuser Salon. Along with Chalukián and Magariños D., he signed the 1955 manifesto "In Defense of the Plastic Arts" and the open letter to Eduardo Barilari, "15 Points and a Moral," in 1957.

Marcela Astudillo maintains that Alfredo always sought to go unnoticed: "He did everything from a kind of shadow, as the exhibition's title suggests, and perhaps one of the reasons for this would be his aversion to the higher spheres of artistic institutions, to the market that interferes with the natural fluidity of creative processes, or to the social demands of the artistic world."

What runs through this quantity of works that, due to their size, force us to stop at every detail, works made with a long time of obsessive practice , immaculate papers that are still very well preserved, freehand line drawings with a rigorous meticulousness of someone who wants his hand to respond to a skilled trade of abstract draftsmanship.

The curator recounted that he worked hard during the day and, in his free time, isolated himself from his family. In solitude, he pursued his effectiveness with rigor until the wee hours , something corroborated by his children, who saw their father driven by this passion, which he had to abandon due to a detached retina, perhaps caused by his very attempt to leave a mark.

It's entirely fortuitous that their work hasn't ended up in the trash, as happens with some artists' heirs, who decide what's valuable and discard what they don't find interesting, without any criteria. And what's literally fortuitous is that Federico and Marcela understood that this narrative needed to be explored in depth to bring back to the contemporary world a group and an artist who reference an attitude very typical of the postwar years: questioning the established order and generating new debates.

It is recommended to focus on the years of execution, since the gallery decided not to resort to a linear system from year to year, but rather to consider the relationships that can be established between different types of production . From those that appeal solely to a forceful minimalism using lines of the same thickness, to those that explore a dynamism almost close to three-dimensional work, to the development of a composition that integrates form, color, and spatial balance for the carpets that may one day be manufactured.

But it is also important to verify the didactic sense that was also an essential component of those times: defining what the line is, observing the relationships between other artists to exemplify ways of using plastic vocabulary, being interested in the historical processes that support some innovations, but almost fundamentally, developing through the creative act an intelligence expanded to observation and method.

Alfredo Carracedo, in the shadow of abstraction , can be visited Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Galería Towpyha, Piedras 986, San Telmo.