Viviana Zargón

Cecilia Iida

To reach far is a return. To go far away means to return.

Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching

There is an ongoing search that guides Viviana Zargón along her path as an artist. She produces paintings with a celebratory spirit of vindication, works that manage to capture the effervescence of the eighties. During the nineties she reinvented herself and, going against the grain of the era’s predominant styles, she made several of the crises and transformations of the modern world manifest in her images. During the years that followed, she explored different graphic techniques and the possibilities offered by new media while simultaneously gaining visibility abroad, achieving a consolidated place for her work in the international art world.

Viviana Zargón was born in Buenos Aires in 1958. From the very beginning, her life unfolded in an atmosphere that included art on an everyday, first hand basis. Her parents maintained close ties with artists, gallery owners and intellectuals. From very early on, she attended events and exhibitions held at the Instituto Di Tella, in addition to other manifestations of art at the time. Motivated by this creative universe, she attended the Instituto Vocacional de Arte Infantil Manuel José de Labardén, where she received a multidisciplinary education in dance, music, theater and visual arts. From 1973 to 1975 she studied with Anatilde Calabrese and later attended drawing and painting classes in highly respected institutions. This continual contact with avant-garde art and culture from that period were fundamental stimuli that influenced her formative phases as well as her future consolidation as an artist.

In 1976, after completing her high school education, she traveled to Spain and settles there. During that same year she undertook preparatory studies at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de la Lonja and at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, two institutions oriented toward a classical education based on drawing from plaster casts, modeling and copying nature. At the latter, she met her friend Mercè Russell Elexalde, who would accompany her from then on, introducing her to a circle of friends in Barcelona.

on, introducing her to a circle of friends in Barcelona. One year after her arrival she enrolled in the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Sant Jordi (incorporated into the Universidad de Barcelona in 1979), where she chose to study in Joan Hernández Pijuan’s studio, which was the least academic and most analytic option available. The Catalan maestro’s classes offered a rigorous, conceptual approach to art language and students from different years shared the experience in the same studio space. While there Zargón carried out exercises based on the economy of white on white, meditating on plastic issues and showing a large degree of formal synthesis in her works. She intuitively transformed graphic marks into subtle calligraphy, some of which would later form part of a book produced between 1982 and 1984. At the same time, this project presages her use of typography and dialectic opposition between union and fragmentation in diptychs and polyptychs, typical of her later works.

In 1980, these calligraphic works would give way to other experiences carried out on large paper, canvas or cardboard supports on which she explored gesture and color fields reminiscent of Mark Rothko, but without abandoning her own pale palette. Her creative curiosity and confident ease can be seen in a series of self-portraits she produced while studying with photographer Joan Fontcuberta at the Facultad de Bellas Artes.

The death of General Franco in 1975 marked an era of transformations in Spain; visible changes took place in the economy and burgeoning social freedoms appeared as democratic policies were gradually established. For Spanish society, it was a time of extreme contradictions. Tensions arose in the ambivalence between young generations celebrating a no-holds-barred freedom from taboos while conservative traditions continued unchanged. It is in the midst of this atmosphere that Viviana Zargón begins to participate in Catalonian social life, attending street shows and popular celebrations such as the Patum de Berga. She develops an interest in independent theater and follows works presented by the Els Comediants and Els Joglars theater companies.

Paco Cañizares Quero (today an artistic director for contemporary dance and theater) and Marcellí Antúnez Roca (the future founder of La Fura dels Baus) are two of her friends and studio companions from that era with whom she formed lasting relationships that continue today.

During these years, Zargón travels along Catalonia’s ramblas or boulevards on a daily basis, witness to the spontaneous expressions of its emerging cultural scene, such as the scandalous teatrillos (little theaters) by transvestite activist José Pérez Ocaña, who is today considered to be one of Spain’s unquestionable counter-culture figures.

In 1981 and 1982, Zargón has her first shows, a solo show in a town in the province of Gerona and her participation in the XXI Premi Internacional de Dibuix Joan Miró. In August of 1981 she travels to Buenos Aires and stays until January of the following year. She makes contact with people from the local art scene, has a solo show of her calligraphic works at La Trastienda and participates in the Mujeres en la plástica (Women in the Plastic Arts) show, held at the Hilda Solano gallery, and also sends work to the Premio de Dibujo 25 Años show at the Museo de Arte Moderno. A newspaper article records her visit to Argentina, explaining her longing for her home country and describing her studies and work in progress abroad.

Once back in Barcelona, she receives recognition from the Generalitat de Catalunya in the form of a foment grant for the visual arts and investigation of new forms of expression. In parallel, she shares a studio on Plaza Real with Nora Ancarola and other artists. While preparing her university thesis, she proposes new plastic explorations in figurative expressions. She graduates shortly afterward, bringing this period to a close; it had been a time of intense experiences, profound ties with Catalonia’s universe, love and heartbreak, but especially a learning process regarding the enormous potential of artistic language. Having lived abroad would leave its mark on her aesthetic formation and life experience. To put it in the words of Lao Tse, Viviana travels and winds up finding herself, she goes far in order to return.

My obsession revolves around representing a chaotic world full of contradictions and uncertainty.

Viviana Zargón, 1985¹

Viviana Zargón returned home just as a new democratic era was dawning in Argentina in 1983. Following years of censorship, repression and institutionalized violence perpetrated by the state, the country is in the midst of an awakening, a new level of consciousness; she reencounters her homeland and renews social ties. In the art field, creative energy is rapidly expanding, languages are combined and overlapped and public space is recovered. Among the many celebratory actions that took place that year, the Asociación Argentina de Críticos de Arte organized the Homenaje de las artes visuales a la democracia (The Visual Arts’ Homage to Democracy) event, where many different thematic proposals and disciplines were invited to exhibit in different cultural spaces throughout the city. At the Arte Nuevo gallery directed by Álvaro Castagnino, she participated in carrying out Obra abierta (Open Artwork) along with Miguel Ángel Bengoechea, Fernando Fazzolari, Jorge Gamarra, Víctor Grippo, María Juana Heras Velasco, Enio Iommi, Guillermo Kuitca, Emilio Renart, Juan Pablo Renzi, Carlos Silva and Luis Alberto Wells. The project consisted of an environment that occupied the entire space, involving plastic interventions on the walls, ceiling and floor. Along with banners and chapels for ex-votos related to democracy, there were materials distributed throughout the installation that enabled visitors’ active participation via written messages or drawings, and cards intervened by artists were also available for the taking that functioned as the show’s catalog. In this way, collaborative work and participation strategies—both characteristics of the previous decade’s avant-garde art—were recovered and re-signified in a new context. Following years of repression and closedowns, Obra abierta converted gestures that had served as catalysts into a celebration and confirmation of creative energy and the recovery of the vital experience of freedom.

Zargón rapidly acquires visibility on the local art scene, exhibiting alongside some of the moment’s most important authors. In 1984 she participates in the 11 Artistas pintan en público (11 Artists Paint in Public) show along with Margarita Paksa, Mildred Burton, Diana Dowek, Alicia Carletti and Andrea Racciatti, among others. Her works are selected to participate in the era’s most important prizes;² she is invited to show by gallery owners Álvaro Castagnino and Ruth Benzacar and her contact with artists such as Víctor Grippo, Eduardo Audivert and Luis Felipe Noé sparks their interest in her work.

At that time she began to share a large, sunny studio on Montañeses street in the Belgrano neighborhood with ceramicist Patricia Siegrist, where they would organize talks and encounters between artists and critics.

Between 1985 and 1988, she taught at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Cárcova, in the painting department run by Juan Pablo Renzi; when this department ceases to exist in 1989, her post is transferred to Alejandro Puente’s area. In the educational realm, her youth constitutes a fresh contribution that is recognized by other professors, as are her incisive perception and capacity for artistic reflection. During this time, the institution offers an atmosphere of camaraderie and a meeting of minds. Ideas and experiences are exchanged between professors and students on an everyday basis at the Cárcova’s bar, administered by Luis Portillos.

With this same spirit, the La Compañía group comes into being in 1985, which includes Carlos Masoch, Diana Aisenberg, Luis Pereyra and Fernando Fazzolari along with the artist. With Fazzolari’s studio as the usual meeting point, they register their ideas and proposals in a tone as solemn as it is humorous in a Libro de actas (Book of Acts) the whereabouts of which are unknown today. The group’s tendency toward informal provocation leads to the publication of an arts section called “Plastikool” for Twist y Gritos newspaper, presenting a fresh panorama of local contemporary art. They also organize activities like auctions and exhibitions, and they participate in shows along with Liliana Maresca, Elba Bairon, Guillermo Kuitca, Jorge Gumier Maier, Rafael Bueno, Martín Reyna and José Garófalo, among others. Although each author possessed their own distinctive image, they shared an interest in urban, counter-culture aesthetics and the intersections between art and theater that typify the entire decade. In this sense, Fazzolari recalls the heterogeneous, marginal spirit of their production: we would work in stage design, publish drawings in rock magazines, paint in the subway and try out different media.³

In the exhibition held at the Centro Cultural San Martín, La adoración de la Madonna de la pintura (The Adoration of the Madonna of Painting, 1985), there is a notable absence of restrictions within the group and their collective potential is quite clear. They make presentations in less conventional spaces that year, for example Pintura joven (Young Painting) at Zona Joven or the show organized for the theater piece by Emeterio Cerro titled El Cuiscuis at the Teatro Espacios, a characteristic overlap between visual arts and theater.

The transformations that affect Zargón’s painting reflect the effervescent and contradictory atmosphere that marked the eighties. Her palette expands and explodes in vibrant colors; the explorations she undertook toward the end of her Catalonian period transform into expressive figuration with a variety of references. This shift in her production is clear in her solo show from 1985 at the Ruth Benzacar gallery, one of contemporary art’s most emblematic spaces. The numerous press articles that appeared called attention to the artist’s images and attest to the wide diversity of iconographic motifs and references employed in a key of international eclecticism; Valeria González, on the other hand, understands this multiplicity as a symptom and clear manifestation of the changes the country was experiencing at the time.⁴ Zargón’s works evidence the pulse of divergent and even incongruent aspects of eighties culture in Argentina: My obsession revolves around representing a chaotic world full of contradictions and uncertainty, she would confess to Luis Felipe Noé.⁵

Her painting is vehement, embodying a theatrical condition with enormous power of expression. The gammas that I use—violets, raw yellows and blues—and delimiting the space occupied by each color with line brought me to relate painting with the devices used in comics and theatrical imagery.⁶ The expressive tone of these works also connected them with recent history; a past that can be glimpsed in the tortured, silenced or reclusive figures that inhabit these pictorial scenarios along with classical references and other divergent elements.

The eighties’ atmosphere of liberation and vindication gave new impetus to debate involving gender issues.⁷ Zargón would participate in different activities bringing women artists together within this framework, such as the 11 Artistas pintan en público show in 1984; La mujer en la plástica argentina I (Women in Argentina’s Plastic Arts I) show, at the Centro Cultural Las Malvinas in 1988 and Mitominas. Un paseo a través de los mitos (Myth-Chicks. A Stroll through Myths) show from 1986. The latter was an interdisciplinary event, presented at the Centro Cultural Ciudad de Buenos Aires (now the Centro Cultural Recoleta), in which the artist co-created the piece titled Hera- Atenea-Afrodita. Tres estilos de mujer (Hera-Athena-Aphrodite. Three Styles of Women) with Micaela Patania. The work proposed an analysis of feminine roles in contemporary society.⁸ On this occasion, she also took part in the Taller Fotográfico de Reflexión “La mujer y los mitos” (“Women and Myths” Photographic Reflection Workshop), a project that invited participants to utilize diverse elements in order to select a myth and incarnate it by way of their body. It was an enriching experience, promoting individual thought processes at the same time that it allowed the different solutions chosen by each participant to be observed. Dressed as Aphrodite, Viviana Zargón posed for Alicia D’Amico’s camera; the images remained on exhibit throughout the duration of the show.

A drive toward critical reflection and questioning her own art practice becomes increasingly visible in her continuous theoretical explorations. Between 1986 and 1989 she attends courses on the semiotics of art, philosophy and aesthetics; she deliberates modern and postmodern art’s historical conceptual processes with renowned Argentinean critics and intellectuals including Carlos Espartaco, Jorge López Anaya, Elena Oliveras and Rosa María Ravera, among others.

From different positions in the field, her work is understood as pertaining to the era’s emerging art proposals. Accordingly, her paintings are included in the Vanguardias (Avant-gardes) show at Arte Nuevo in 1986, and in 1987 a jury comprised of Juan Doffo, Carlos Espartaco and Jorge Glusberg award her with a special Mention at the Sociedad Hebraica’s XXVII Concurso Estímulo para Jóvenes Artistas Plásticos. Between 1987 and 1992 she also participated in the last four editions of the Voces emergentes (Emerging Voices) show, held to coincide with the Jornadas de la Crítica organized by the Asociación de Críticos and the Centro de Arte y Comunicación, with the aim of presenting a survey of current art and promoting theoretical activities and exhibitions involving local and international art figures.

Toward the end of this period, the decline of an intense decade can be observed. The insistence on collective art practices, intersecting art languages and the presence of the body—to mention just a few of its characteristic traits—undergo transformation and a new mood emerges, giving rise to other forms of action and production that will be the avatars of nineties art.

You never look at me from the place from which I see you.

Jacques Lacan ⁹

The objective is to dislodge the gaze from its usual habits and to overcome the comfort of one work after another. The installation of paintings that Viviana Zargón, Micaela Patania and Silvia Rivas present in 1990 at the Tema gallery aimed at generating a play between works that cut through space, using lighting that created focal areas of light and cones of shadow. The proposal was based on the aphorism by Lacan and it led viewers to sharpen their perception and become aware of the subjectivity involved in the act of looking. This experience and other, visible transformations in her images affirm that she was entering a period of interrogation and exploration on a personal level, within the framework of a changing context.

In 1990, in a visual arts panorama that still lacked clearly defined boundaries, Carlos Espartaco authored an article about the Premio Fundación Nuevo Mundo, in which Zargón was participating. The critic wrote in reference to the relevance of pictorial trends from the eighties, observing the shock of the end of an era and the accompanying diffuse aesthetics.¹⁰ In a similar tone, Laura Feinsilber read a certain superficiality or inertia in the tendencies ex hibited in the show.¹¹ These and other accounts from the time evidence the experience shared by that generation and the proximity of a new visual model. Along similar lines, the artist’s work is selected for the era’s principal prizes¹² and she is invited to participate in events that focus on youth and novelty, aspects that are given priority in critical discourse representing emerging art. Accordingly, in 1990 the artist shows in Arte joven (Young Art) jointly with Jorge Macchi, Andrea Racciatti, Pablo Siquier, Anahí Cáceres and Mónica Girón, among others. In 1991, she would participate in Menor o igual a 30 (Less than or Equal to 30), a show held at the Fundación Banco Patricios, along with Ernesto Ballesteros, Miguel Harte, Jorge Macchi, Marcelo Pombo and other artists who would shortly later be pointed out as the creators of new visual styles.¹³

In this context, her production takes a new direction, which will lead her to develop an imagery all her own, the first hints of which are exhibited in 1993 in a solo show held at the Julia Lublin gallery. Though the expressive gesture on a pictorial plane from previous work continues, in these pieces grids and other delineated geometric patterns determine a central rectangle, above which anonymous and imaginary architectural structures stand. These works establish a time line along which earlier gestures—suggested in the ruins of expressive painting— enter into dialog with the convergence of architecture-based imagery.

These new images receive critical recognition in the form of a First Prize in Painting at the Arte Security (1994) show, held at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. Nevertheless, this proposal would turn out to be one step along the way toward a production that would soon take on other connotations.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when in can be recognized and is never seen again.

Walter Benjamin ¹⁴

In 1994, she comes across a work by Rómulo Macció that she had originally seen some time before, and it unleashes a series of memories that crystallize in scenes of the port area. In the terms of the German philosopher, one might suggest that the flashes of these furtive representations of memory light up to fix an image that connects the past with the present. During her youth, the artist used to meet with her father often to go on walks around the port area, with its industrial landscape bordering the Río de la Plata; it is without question a venue that still beckons to her. She would return there during the time she taught at the Cárcova, and once this territory became a theme in her painting, she would naturally frequent it time and again. In the piece titled Rómulo pintó Mi infancia (Rómulo Painted My Childhood, 1994), aesthetic and thematic parameters materialize that will form the basis for Zargón’s work as it continues to advance in a sure, significant direction. She works with acrylic paint using brushes and spatula and utilizes ground glass and modeling paste to give body to a plastic structure in which references to the port appear for the first time. Her use of black tones in the background—unusual for her at the time—in addition to illuminated architecture seem to corroborate the very instant when a memory is frozen, like a flash of lightning that fleetingly and unpredictably lights up objects amidst a sea of darkness.

She then begins to visit docks and silos accompanied by artist Mariano Sardón, her assistant at the time, documenting warehouses and factories slated to be demolished or remodeled in photographs. These records make up an archive containing a repertoire of images that she would use to compose her paintings from 1995 on. These were two-part canvases in which the upper field showed pictorial representation of the black and white photographic images of her port documentation, while in the lower section there was a return to calligraphy along with symbols related to the knowledge of mankind. The many different positions from which she constructs narratives in her painting are condensed in these series. Port imagery ties her family history and the history of Argentina’s economic cycles together.

During this phase of consolidating her pictorial practice, her work circulates abroad with renewed impetus. In 1995, she and Andrea Racciatti both receive sponsorship for solo shows at Houston’s Brazil Art Space. She then comes into contact with gallery director María Inés Sicardi, who promotes her work and plans new exhibitions. Shortly afterward, she travels to the Dominican Republic, where she meets critic and researcher Marianne de Tolentino, with whom she organizes a group show in 1996 along with Silvia Brewda, Jorge Iberlucea, Carlos Kravetz and Héctor Medici, held at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. This show would later be presented at the Praxis gallery and at Puerto Rico’s Museo de Arte e Historia in San Juan. The International Association of Art Critics awarded her with the first and second prizes, respectively, for the best foreign show at each museum. Her work enjoys continuing presence in the Caribbean in exhibitions organized by the quintet of artists in 1998 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá and at the Arteconsult gallery, run by Carmen Alemán, who represents Zargón from that point on, consolidating a privileged position for her painting within the region.

At the same time, her artistic proposals acquire notable visibility in Italy. In 1996, the Bianchi Nuovi gallery invites her to their space for a solo show curated by Guglielmo Capogrossi. One of her paintings is later acquired by the Museo della Matematica in Rome. Between 1997 and 1999 her works are shown by the Over Studio foundation, with collaboration from Laura Fasano, in solo shows, group shows and at the Artissima International Contemporary Art Fair, all activities widely publicized in Italian media.

In 1997, in Argentina, Álvaro Castagnino invites her to exhibit at the Filo art space. The show is called Polyhedra, also presented one year later at the Sicardi-Sanders Gallery in Houston. In the prologue to the catalog, Edward Shaw emphasizes the play between fragmentation and unity that sustains her compositions in both conceptual and plastic terms, and in a press review in the North American media, Aaron Howard points out that Zargón’s paintings are a journey through a private museum of memory.¹⁵ Indications of the changes that will soon mark a new direction in her painting’s development appear in both shows, to be clearly revealed in the solo exhibition that followed, curated by Elena Oliveras and held at the Centro Cultural Borges. This show is considered to be a “turning point” in the artist’s career by Valeria González, marking the beginning of a new body of work, one that the authors contributing to this publication analyze in depth.

During this period, the artist’s photographic archive continues to grow: she creates visual registers of new factories, warehouses and power stations. Zargón visits these spaces and looks through her lens in search of a perspective or atmosphere that is prone to being transformed into painting. Nevertheless, the resulting images are never exact copies, but reelaborations in which diverse references occasionally cross paths, including documentary records found in libraries or book shops in Argentina or North America that specialize in architecture from the end of one century and the beginning of the next. Accordingly, her work with cross-references brings constructions with different origins together. These images demonstrate that a much broader historical framework is involved in the ebb and flow of Argentina’s economic cycles: that of the crisis of all modern societies.

In 1998, Viviana Zargón begins to live with her husband, Richi, who has accompanied her in her work and artistic career. That same year, the Fundación Antorchas awards her a grant that she uses to explore photography itself as an artistic medium and the possibilities that new technologies have to offer. This research will result in a series of proposals that she gradually and thoughtfully develops in a subsequent phase. Just prior to this, on April 27, 1999, her daughter Michelle is born, a tireless traveler who accompanies her at openings and shows all over the world where the artist’s work is involved.

During that same year, she participates in the group show called Argentine Pathways, held at the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture in Los Angeles (USA); she exhibits at the Raffaella Silbernagl Arte Contemporanea gallery in Daverio (Italy), and her work is presented for the first time at arteBA (Argentina). At the same time, she shows one of her photography-based paintings at Fotofest (Houston, Texas), one of the first international exhibitions that features this artistic medium.

They are installed paintings, if you like, and to a certain extent the content of these works reflects the transformation that Argentina has gone through. It is an urban landscape with social content.

Viviana Zargón, 2006¹⁶

The new decade marks an intense phase of production and a great deal of travel in Zargón’s life. During the first few years, her works’ most frequent destination would be the Caribbean: in 2000 she took part in one group show at the Botello gallery and another titled Puerto a puerto, held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Puerto Rico and at Arteconsult in Panamá.¹⁷ In 2003, at the Museo Interoceánico del Canal de Panamá, the Ultramarinos exhibition was organized, in which the artist participated for the first time with a group of small format photo-etchings depicting different perspectives of a precarious construction found inside a factory. The series was mounted on the wall in a previously established grid format, recalling industrial mass production.

In Argentina, the climate is one of upheaval. Zargón continues to reflect on industry and labor’s economic cycles. Widespread social revolts in 2001 clearly evidence the nineties’ prolonged, veiled crisis, further exacerbated by neoliberal policies; it was a crisis that the artist had registered for several years in her paintings, exhibiting it with raw, poetic accuracy:

Like an industrial archaeologist, I investigated, looking for traces and gathering testimony and stories about manufacturing ventures undertaken in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries: old factories that ceased to function due to successive crises and reconversions. I have put together an archive with this photographic documentary material on urban spaces that no longer exist. I have witnessed the forerunners of a crisis experienced like so many others in our country. This is how the Serie de la industria argentina (Argentinean Industry Series) came into being.¹⁸

With these words, the artist announces the first appearance of what would be an extensive group of works involving several series; these include one group of analog color photos shot in frontal views recording scenes of different factories closed just one month earlier. On the white walls of the Centro Cultural Recoleta, the images were mounted in a grid. The show Adaptaciones urbanas (Urban Adaptations, 2005) is the first of many in which the artist participates with photographs.

That same year, she adds profoundly dark paintings with different formats and contours to her polyptych pieces for the solo exhibition presented at Arteconsult. These pieces demonstrate a greater degree of synthesis and modeling of light, creating more atmosphere for scenes from which humanity has been vacated. These works are also shown at the Museo Calderón de la Guardia in San José, Costa Rica, in 2006, with a prologue to the catalog written by Mercedes Casanegra. There are ample photographic records of both shows that confirm the attendance of many figures from art and cultural circles as well as friends and relatives, including little Michelle, naturally, who plays or executes pirouettes among the crowd while accompanying the artist.

In Argentina, Florencia Braga Menéndez and Gachi Prieto invite her to participate in the Blanco (White) show, held at the Centro Cultural Borges in 2007 and at the Museo de Arte de Tigre and the Teatro Argentino de La Plata one year later. The numerous artists taking part in the exhibition include Carmelo Arden Quin, Elba Bairon, Irene Banchero, Cristina Schiavi, Eduardo Stupía, Leonel Luna, Lux Lindner, Benito Laren, Silvia Gurfein, Silvia Rivas and Tulio de Sagastizábal.

In parallel to her participation in arteBA with the Isabel Salinas gallery from Costa Rica, in 2008 she is invited to figure among the artists in the Colección metropolitana contemporánea (Metropolitan Contemporary Collection) group show held at the Casa de la Cultura in Buenos Aires. There, she shows along with Sergio Avello, Matías Duville, Patricio Larrambebere, Fabián Marcaccio, Matilde Marín, Daniel Ontiveros, Ariadna Pastorini, Martín Reyna and Pablo Suárez, among others

Once her work had been consolidated both locally and abroad, she presented pieces to prize exhibitions more sporadically: in 2000, she was awarded the Medalla de Oro for the Premio Armando Sica, and in 2008, the Primer Premio Valoarte, shown at the Galería Nacional in San José, Costa Rica.¹⁹ At the same time, she participated in the II Premio de Pintura Universidad del Salvador (2008) and the XIV Premio de la Fundación Federico Jorge Klemm (2010). On the other hand, from mid-decade on, different galleries dedicated to showing Latin American art on a global level invite Zargón to exhibit works. She begins to participate in the Miami Arteamérica, Scope and Miami art fairs, in addition to several editions of ARTBO in Bogotá, Art Lima and Photo Lima in Peru, Pinta in London and New York, Ch.ACO in Chile, Buenos Aires Photo, Art Rio in Brazil and different fairs in Holland. Her participation in these events leads to her work being inscribed in the international art world and she achieves high visibility. In 2008 she is convoked for a solo exhibition at Pinta’s New York edition. Correspondingly, her presence in these events brings her into contact with critics and collectors from different parts of the world and she exhibits alongside recognized creators like Carlos Capelán, Darío Escobar, Fabio Herrera, Priscilla Monge, Adán Vallecillo and Daniel Senise, among others.

During the last years of the decade, different overseas institutions invite Zargón to exhibit: in 2009, she participates in the Arte ahora (Art Now) group show, organized by Arteconsult in Chicago, and in November that same year, at the same organization’s Panamanian venue she presents a solo show of paintings. In 2010, one of her works pertaining to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico’s permanent collection is included in the Careos/Relevos (Confrontations/Disclosures) exhibition, curated by Liliana Ramos -Collado.

One day, looking over the residual objects left behind in a closed factory, the artist sees a radiator dryer that reminds her of Duchamp’s emblematic bottle rack. This starts her thinking about all the anonymous creativity and everyday knowledge that disappear along with every job that is lost. This way of seeing is the origin that gives rise to the Objetos inútiles (Useless Objects, 2010) series of photographs, analyzed in this publication by Gonzalo Aguilar. In this sense, Gilles Deleuze would say that types of machines are easily matched with each type of society— not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them.²⁰

Continuing her search for new ways of presenting her production, Zargón creates a group of works in 2011 titled Cadena de producción (Production Line). As the name indicates, these photographs were laid out in a linear sequence, alluding to the mechanized chain of steps involved in factory work. The color shots are exhibited using a horizontal light box. The artist would seem to deliberate between resistance and a fruitless attempt to set a system into motion knowing that it is destined to be dismantled.

The photos that she finally used in composing these backlights, as well as those in the Objetos inútiles series, were shots she had taken almost ten years earlier. In general, the images that make up Viviana Zargón’s archive function in this way: they remain in a constant state of latent potential, awaiting some new opportunity. This is how new life was granted to the Palais des Machines, which Zargón had used in a fragmentary manner in the late nineties and came back to take on a central role in her Índice, serie, secuencia, inventario (Index, Series, Sequence, Inventory) show. This exhibition, with a prologue by Kekena Corvalán, was presented at the Gachi Prieto gallery in 2011 and at Arteconsult in 2012.²¹ In an article, Paola De Maurizio points out:

…the space that [Zargón] chooses to represent is not one that has been abandoned, but that was especially made to be ephemeral, and the act of her choice makes the content of her representations universal. The frustrated desires and ambitions from local microhistories move toward the globalizing content of our culture’s, disappointments the impossibility of the expected, fleetingness, absences, voids, and forgotten spaces.²²

Currently, the artist’s career is taking firm steps forward on an international level. From 2011 through 2014 she has received invitations to exhibit in different fairs (Scope, ArtLima and ARTBO) with the Jacob Karpio gallery. She has simultaneously continued to show in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and institutions in Puerto Rico, Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, Central America, Italy and Holland. Over the course of these years she came into contact with different members of the La Encomienda group and other Peruvian artists with whom she maintains close friendship.

In 2015, new reflections unfold in Zargón’s production, emerging in the context of a series of international solo shows. One of these is Arqueologías de la memoria (Archaeologies of Memory), installed at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima in Peru with Rodrigo Alonso as curator; shortly afterward, it was also presented at the Lucía de la Puente gallery in the same city. In parallel, the Aluna curatorial group, consisting of Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos, organized a solo show for Zaragón in Miami based on photographic language. Along with her most recent work, black and white shots of the documentary archive on which her pictorial work is based are shown for the first time (Arte Factum/Fictions: Viviana Zargón, at the Focus Locus space at the Aluna Art Foundation).

Amid the broad range of different formats and images exhibited in these shows, she presents a new series of large-sized format color photographs in which the artist registers empty, yet strangely functioning industrial scenarios. Even without human presence, these places are fully populated with indications of activity. Through digital manipulation, the artist achieves a luminous atmosphere of great beauty in which an inverse process now takes place, with photography approaching painting. This is a new direction, an imaginary North that guides Viviana Zargón in her continuing reflections as she composes images in which documentary and poetry fruitfully coexist.