Viviana Zargón: A Retrospective

In 1976 Viviana Zargón was just eighteen years old but already sure that she would be an artist, and she left for Barcelona to further her studies. She would return to Argentina in 1982, to exhibit her work shortly afterward at Ruth Benzacar, one of the most important galleries in Buenos Aires. Since that time, critics’ attention has never strayed from her work. Between 1997 and 1998 she arrived at a distinctive form of imagery, one that she has distilled over the past fifteen years into subtle, obsessive works that enjoy widespread recognition today. The preceding decades, flush with pictorial activity, exhibitions and ties with the art world have undoubtedly been determining factors in the artist’s life, inexorably leading to the degree of maturity she exhibits today. Nevertheless, it would be an error to reduce the path traversed to a simple scheme of formal evolution. This itinerary has involved leaps forward and pivot-point changes in direction, risks often based on pure intuition, with an ear to the rhythm of the surrounding context or in response to subconscious motives which can be reread now from the privileged distance that hindsight invariably offers.

In Buenos Aires, in 1982

In an interview for Clarín newspaper at the outset of 1989, Elena Oliveras asked her, When do you think you began to elaborate your own visual language?¹ Viviana Zargón replied without hesitation: In Buenos Aires, in 1982. An abrupt change effectively did take place then, from the pale, elegant abstractions she produced in Barcelona and the teeming figurative pieces employing a furious palette that she began to paint upon her return. This leap is hardly difficult to explain if we keep in mind that her earliest production dealt more with exercises—impeccable, but also conservative in some way—related to her artistic education rather than to personal production. We should also consider how different the art world that Zargón experienced in Barcelona was from the one she found in Buenos Aires at the time.

When the artist left for Spain, in 1976, not only was Argentina entering into its most violent dictatorship, but one of the most outstanding chapters of its artistic production was also abruptly coming to a close, a period that had situated Buenos Aires on a par with the central nerve centers of contemporary experimentalism. In Barcelona, academic circles in the fine arts were undergoing a phase where the gestural, full-bodied painting that had erupted during the highpoint of abstract expressionism in North America in the ‘50s was becoming formalized and institutionalized. Joan Hernández Pijuan (a painter from Antoni Tàpies’ generation) was one of the maestros who most influenced Viviana Zargón in her formative years. As she herself pointed out on several occasions during the ‘80s, the most fundamental part of her education was acquiring "plastic concepts that went beyond notions of the abstract or the figurative". The change in direction in her work upon her arrival in Buenos Aires rapidly demonstrated her ability to employ the masterful technique she had acquired to her own ends.

The least substantial aspect of the North American post-War pictorial model was its discourse. While critics such as Clement Greenberg championed a repression of all verbal language in favor of "pure" visual appreciation,² artists resisted this, defending "content" by way of a melange of extemporaneous ideas (dealing with the sublime, primitive, heroic, religious, tragic or mythic, etc.), understood in terms of eternal, universal essences. Viviana Zargón’s graduation thesis provides a glimpse of this lack of language, which oscillates between perplexity regarding the supposedly ineffable nature of images and drawing in artists’ statements from Barnett Newman’s generation. In the previously mentioned 1989 interview, Zargón still insists on art as if it were a force of "magic," something "timeless," capable of capturing "the essence of mankind." In contrast to these discursive alibis, however, her artistic ability had already demonstrated a singular capability for perception and integration, not with respect to universal categories, but the specific movements in culture and the arts that were underway in Argentina at that time. The degree to which Viviana Zargón was actively involved in the unique chapter in Argentinean art history that was the ‘80s decade must be clearly established.

This is an era in which everything happens in the street.

La Compañía

Culture during the ‘80s in Argentina cannot be separated from the country’s process of returning to democracy, which saw the expression of both repudiation of the military dictatorship and fervor for its newly regained freedom. Although the recovery of public spaces and collective practices was clearly tied to an inheritance from the combative art of the ‘60s and ‘70s, during the ‘80s they came to be instituted as omnipresent resources that permeated cultural manifestations of the most diverse shapes and forms. These often involved incarnations of another return of the repressed: the body and sexuality. From independent theater to gestural painting, art of the ‘80s was multidisciplinary and related to performance in its very essence, and committing the body often functioned as a fluid link between politics and the celebration of individual expression. The most representative and interesting artistic manifestations took place outside of institutions, on the street and in unforeseeable places such as underground theaters, bars and discos. In parallel, a new model came into being in the art world, based on certain critics’ and curators’ discourse describing Argentinean painting from the ‘80s, clearly influenced by aesthetics disseminated from Europe like Transavantgarde or Neo-Expressionism.³

Viviana Zargón became an active part of these two spheres: the first was more spontaneous, related to constituting new ties with artists and participating in group creative experiences; the second had to do with her new pictorial work, included extensively in exhibitions that are today considered paradigmatic of Argentinean painting from this decade. In December, 1983, after having only recently arrived, she was invited to participate in a group of shows organized as Homenaje de las artes visuales a la democracia (The Visual Arts’ Homage to Democracy) at the Arte Nuevo gallery. The proposal included recognized artists such as Víctor Grippo, Enio Iommi, Guillermo Kuitca, Juan Pablo Renzi and Emilio Renart among many others, and the decision was made to generate a participative, environmental group artistic experience titled Obra abierta (Open Artwork).⁴

Toward the end of the following year, Zargón was invited along with other women artists to paint in public at the Centro Cultural Recoleta (then called the Centro Cultural Ciudad de Buenos Aires). At the same time, an extensive group of artists got together to show at the El Ciudadano space on Costa Rica street. Among the participants, the five painters who would soon make up the La Compañía group were already present: Viviana Zargón, Diana Aisenberg, Fernando Fazzolari, Carlos Masoch and Luis Pereyra. We would find them together again in March of 1985, holding a show in parallel to a piece presented by Emeterio Cerro at the Espacios theater.⁵ Cerro was one of the new young theater movement’s most representative figures, who ranged from drama to hilarity in a search to break away from years of silence and censorship imposed by the dictatorship. This was also representative of the continual coexistence between theater, performance and the visual arts: this was less about objects to be exhibited than it dealt with generating spaces and experiences to be lived jointly. The aim that motivated the formation of this quintet of painters was quite accurately reflected in its name, La Compañía (The Company, also referring to being accompanied or in good company). The group was presented in public for the first time in April, 1985, at the Centro Cultural General San Martín, where, in addition to their individual pieces, they generated an installation as a group that was titled La adoración de la Madonna de la pintura (Adoration of the Madonna of Painting).⁶

Toward the end of that same year, Viviana Zargón was invited to participate in a series of four solo shows at the Ruth Benzacar gallery (the others were Pablo García Reinoso with sculptures; Max Ruiz with photographs and Jorge Simes with prints). Her work was reviewed in the era's most important media. Different critics' views coincided in an appreciation for the singular equilibrium demonstrated between two opposing forces: a centrifugal impulse created by iconography, juxtaposing incongruent motifs and diverse cultural references and a wisdom for order made manifest in a constructive use of a broad, saturated palette in solid compositions.⁷ The Italian Transavantgarde model was well known by critics and curators at the time and it served as a catalyst in an understanding of Zargón's heterogeneous repertoire, especially her allusion to the classic world by way of fragmentary motifs. Aside from these considerations, the specific and contextual meaning of her work seemed difficult to grasp. As Viviana Usubiaga has demonstrated, the pulse of particular concerns in Argentinean painting from the ‘80s cannot be simply reduced to the impact of tendencies from the international market.⁸

Paradoxically, an indication of this can be found in the conservative admonition that critic César Magrini dedicated to Zargón in his newspaper column for El Cronista Comercial. He suggested that the artist should "revise the multiplicity and simultaneity of the media she uses […] purify her language" and, clearly displeased, observed that she "wants to say many things, all at the same time, while many of these things are irreconcilable, for example that in the theater many actions might unfold at the same time."⁹ This was precisely one of theatrical experimentation’s typical characteristics during the recovered democracy’s first years, an atmosphere in which visual artists freely circulated, as stated earlier. The permeability between theater and painting in the ‘80s has often been restricted to the performatic condition of gestural brushstrokes (exploited as such in proposals where artists would paint "live", as mentioned). The theatrical condition of Zargón's images goes beyond this; it consists of suggesting an illusory space on the plane of the canvas where divergent timeframes, characters, objects, situations and sentiments are able to coexist. As such, her work joins in with the cultural impulse of that era, when assimilating a traumatic past gave rise to contradictory expressions, loaded with euphoria or drama.

There were two moments, then, that existed

In 1986, Viviana Zargón was invited to participate in Vanguardias, an extensive exhibition held at the Arte Nuevo gallery that demonstrated the breadth and importance of the ‘80s model of Argentinean painting. The seventeen invited artists included figures that are paradigmatic today, such as Juan José Cambre, Ana Eckell, Guillermo Kuitca, Osvaldo Monzo, Duilio Pierri, Alfredo Prior, Juan Pablo Renzi and Marcia Schvartz, in addition to the five members of La Compañía. That same year, Zargón was among the group of women who put together the first edition of Mitominas (Myth-chicks), presented in November at the Centro Cultural Ciudad de Buenos Aires. As opposed to typical group exhibitions "by women"—a curatorial criterion as insipid as it is reiterated—Mitominas arose as an ambitious project of collaborative interdisciplinary creation organized with an explicit line of reflection. In her 2011 doctoral thesis, María Laura Rosa established the relevance of this event, which later fell into oblivion due to the tendency during the ‘90s to depoliticize "gender-related" issues.¹⁰ Viviana Zargón and Micaela Patania presented an environment that made reference to "the three styles of women" described in Susana Pravaz’s text regarding the basis of the classical figures Hera, Aphrodite and Athena. Feminine images represented on the walls and objects placed on the floor symbolized how feminine roles in the home, at work or in the erotic realm are transformed according to these myths. It was not a space that viewers could enter and walk around in; it was more of a scenario that could even be thought of as a three-dimensional version of Zargón’s theatrical paintings. Although it employed a different iconographic repertoire, the accumulation of elements, wise and unexpected syntax and above all, the strident colors used recall her pictorial production from that era.

Mitominas can also be considered to form part of the final phase of experiences from the effervescent cultural scene of the ‘80s. In her approach to the first retrospective exhibition featuring said phenomenon, Escenas de los 80, los primeros años (Scenes from the ‘80s, the Early Years), curator Ana María Battistozzi established 1986-1987 as chronological limit, pointing out that this decade implied "two moments with differentiated political and social articulations".¹¹ Different extra-artistic factors played a part in the dissipation of that initial fervor, ranging from pressure from the military class to growing economic difficulties due to the suffocating pressure of foreign debt. Between the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, something in Viviana Zargón's painting would also dim down.

In overall terms, the change from one decade to the next did not provide a climate that was propitious for the artists who had emerged in the heat of the ‘80s. A different atmosphere was being germinated, following the beat of neoliberal regulations that the new government proposed to get the country through its economic crisis. Critics looked upon a series of exhibitions including works by Zargón and other representatives of ‘80s painting with perplexity, expressing skepticism about a situation that they perceived to be eclectic and lacking direction. There was an underlying demand for the unifying categorization of a recognizable style veiled in their complaints. This issue had not been a determining one in the preceding cultural moment, when experiences and artists’ groups bringing diverse languages together had been exactly the point, sharing attitudes and spirit in common rather than consolidating particular tendencies. A new model—Argentinean art from the ‘90s—arose between 1989 and 1992 out of a curatorial program carried out by Jorge Gumier Maier at the Centro Cultural Rojas gallery.¹² Although at the outset exhibitions featured production nurtured by the alternative seedbed of the ‘80s, by the end of 1989 it was clear that a new visual style was emerging. It was a style that was programmatically different from the previous decade’s gestural painting and it turned to new historical references, from Pop Art to the Concrete movement; it wound up being perceived as representing a new culture associated with the figure of then-president Menem. This is not the appropriate place to return to the complex discussions regarding what was supposedly "light" or depoliticized art, but we should recall that the term functioned as an agent of rupture between generations and that, like any defined model, the new art of the ‘90s also generated exclusions. The work of Viviana Zargón, like that of many other artists, saw its relative position within the local art system change. In parallel to this shift, over the course of the same decade the artist would follow a route as fertile as it was full of change, one that would lead her to develop her most distinctive and singular imagery.

Viviana Zargón went through a period of unrest during 1989 and 1990. Looking back from a distance, the artist comprehends her production from that time as indicative of her need for a transition. The new works saw a contracted, notably cooler palette. Above all, the loquacious narrative from her previous works disappeared. Her preference for horizontal scenarios loaded with narrative and complex spatial relationships gave way to large, vertical format canvases with simplified compositions. Foregrounds were occupied by geometric or calligraphic motifs laid out in bands or parallel chains. Behind, there was nothing. Taller than the average person, the canvases confronted viewers with volumetric or luminous modulation condensed on the surface. Instead of a newly conquered territory, the sensation was that of being in the presence of a terrain stripped bare, some sort of inner exile. The literary titles also disappeared, and there were generic names instead: Huellas (Footprints). Footprints are the sign of something that is absent.

Dramatic accounts have effectively been replaced by abstract effects of light and shadow that unfold across the plane. In 1990, Viviana Zargón participated in a joint project with Silvia Rivas and Micaela Patania at the Tema gallery. Her canvases were very vertical, full of sharp-edged forms in earth tones. In order to activate a bodily sense of the gaze, the artists conceived of an environment situation where their paintings occupied the space by way of free-standing screens, heightened further by way of illumination.¹³ While on the one hand the collective labor and interest in creating an environment experience recalls the atmosphere of the ‘80s, some of that era's enthusiasm had waned, and the theatrical aspect was now channeled into a stage-like handling of the installation and lighting, which seemed to replace elements that had previously been entrusted to the paintings.

Simpler and more effective

Any sensation of painting's impotence was left behind for good in 1993, as the group of works from her solo show at the Julia Lublin gallery can attest. As Fabián Lebenglik observed in a comparison between the two shows, the artist had "returned to the same question in ‘traditionally’ elaborated paintings, but in a simpler, more effective way".¹⁴ In a significant change, the patterns she had employed in the screen-paintings from the earlier installation were transformed into a framework featuring a central rectangle in which narrative figuration was present once again.¹⁵ Furthermore, it marked the first appearance of a field of iconography that would become an essential axis in her work from that point on: urban ruins.

A respect for the surface inherited from her earlier work still predominated in these new paintings: the planimetric patterns and geometric grids that make up the border continue into the center rectangle, given that these urban scenes elude perspective's illusionistic spatial penetration and are preferentially organized in horizontal bands or grids. This continuity is reinforced by a uniform palette based on tones of brown. "Patterns and landscape cover, mask and mimic one another," wrote Fabiana Barreda in the catalog text.¹⁶ The author's quoting Borges— in the ubiquitous nature of a book of sand with neither beginning nor end—may have also been a way to point to the continuity of geometry's diffuse references in the case of these new ruins, that seem to pertain everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Something happened that would bring this series to an end.

In 1992, Rómulo Macció exhibited a series of paintings inspired by views of the city of New York at Fundación J.F. Klemm. Two years later, Viviana Zargón appropriated one of them, titled Green Street. Not only did she subject this painter's image to a re-elaboration of her own in formal terms; she also reverted its referential statute. She titled her work Rómulo pintó mi infancia (Rómulo Painted My Childhood), and the architectural setting went from being a fragment of Manhattan to evoking Buenos Aires’ port area where her father had worked and where she had spent so much time in his company since childhood. The dice were cast. To be more precise: the path that would lead to her singular use of this world of iconography—which until then had been deployed in generic implications related to urban ruins—had been laid out. Her painting would leave its symbolic registry behind and venture into the field of memory.

Architectural vestiges emerge from their tombs

Nevertheless, this shift would take place in gradual stages. Macció's urban image was a bridge to the transition. The ensuing steps she would take on solid ground had to do with turning the discovery into a working strategy. The artist returned to the places she remembered with camera in hand, looking for precise references. Her first photographs centered on a crane fallen out of use and visibly deteriorated left standing like an unperturbed ghost in the old port. The first signs of a change in her pictorial work are especially evident in a pair of close-ups of the cabin that exclude the surrounding context, focused on the dilapidated wood and broken windows. She transferred one of these black and white photographs to canvas in mimesis for the first time in 1995. At first, these hyperrealist fragments were situated only in the upper portion of the same pointedly vertical, two-part structures she had been working with for years. As the new photography-inspired element tended to be repeated, the artist continued to work with the same variations in terms of materials and symbolism in the lower portions: impasto surfaces in brown tones including words, numerical formulas or cryptic graphic marks evoking esoteric antique manuscripts or scientific magazines. Two different languages and two different timeframes diverged in these sectors; while the more extensive lower part remained linked to her pictorial past, a new language that would be decisive for the future emerged in the upper portion.

The shift from the pictorial sources that had dominated her work from the beginning toward photography as a new stylistic and semantic point of reference would be fully consummated in 1997. The polyptych called Serie de gravedad (Gravity Series) marked the culmination of the two-part structures. While in previous cases the photographic scene crowned the main panel in the manner of a narrative frieze, in this piece it plays a more important role. The work's serial syntax is derived from the very nature of photographic capture: in the upper portion we are presented with a sequence of different views of the same crane that can be "read" from left to right. The lower field ceases to be a floating element juxtaposed to the other to become integrated into its rhythmic and tectonic structure. Writing underlines the base of the crane as a floor; beneath it, as the title implies, the long earthy plane is affected by a force of attraction, signaled in this case by little human figures that precipitate toward the lower border. A descending vertical tension articulates the photographs’ horizontal sequential rhythm. Once the symbolic, informalist painting had been subordinated and integrated into the logic of hyperrealist painting, it could be completely eliminated. This is the step the artist took that same year in the piece titled 750, 751, in which the photographic image occupied the entire canvas for the first time. In the following work, Estandarte (Banner), the artist placed another, monochrome canvas the same size alongside the hyperrealist painting. This black plane was a consummation in two senses: not only did it mean a radical exclusion of the earlier symbolic language, it also signified substituting a vertical piling of structures with a horizontal succession of parallel modules that echoed the viewer's movement through the exhibition space. In 750, 751, different views of the crane did not adapt well to a format that was still exaggeratedly vertical (160 x 24 cm). Viviana Zargón was already determined to follow in her new direction, however, and she had begun to cover the shore of the Río de la Plata from one end to the other and, in this case, she used an image shot at the Puerto de Frutos, located in Tigre. In the piece that immediately followed, she appropriated a photograph for the first time, taken from a book about the Industrial Revolution. It was already clear that though personal memories had led her to the port, her encounter with the ruins of Argentina’s economy, which had once entertained dreams of progress, provided her with meanings that would transcend far beyond her own biography.

In effect, what was at play here was not merely a simple change in her way of painting. When her work finally let go of esoteric, transcendent symbolism to enter into the field of memory, it upset the very scenario in which its meaning was constructed. This involved personal as well as collective memory, given that her childhood recollections, with all their melancholy, began to come into their own just as Argentinean society began to lament is own ruin. By 1997 the first picketers’ protests against the neoliberal regime of deindustrialization had erupted. In the art field, the reigning model of the ‘90s was showing signs of exhaustion and a retrospective phase was beginning, while new manifestations committed to the social situation appeared in an atmosphere of growing economic, social and political crisis that would eventually culminate in a massive upheaval in December of 2001.

The mortal remains of Argentina’s burgeoning industry

Over the course of these years, the specific significance of Viviana Zargón's new painting became gradually clearer. Firstly, for the artist herself, as the port's photographic image became less and less a disruptive intrusion in a foreign code to completely take control of the pictorial field during a brief but intense process from 1995 to 1997. The entire process was shown in an exhibition at the Filo gallery in November 1997. Critical discourse, however, took somewhat longer to comprehend this outcome. The "undecipherable" or "enigmatic" halo that had earlier emanated from the lower strata of the two-part structures remained dominant in readings of her work, which also tended to hinder the relevance of her photographic references. The explicatory information in Ed Shaw's introductory text—“a photo taken in a port crane”—did not yet manage to inspire associations that could compete with the rhetorical presence of metaphysical or dream-related mysteries (Fabiana Barreda) or with archetypical allusions to "the home as a place of belonging" (Elena Oliveras).¹⁷ In late 1998, a new solo show confirmed Zargón’s decided concentration on photographic records of factory ruins in her painting. Oliveras curated the show, still believing that is was necessary to link these references to a poetically undetermined "ideal city that has been lost".¹⁸ In 2000, an anonymous article in a neighborhood magazine bore witness to the opposite end of the scale: it spoke of how the crisis of the neoliberal regime of the ‘90s would become the dominant framework of interpretation for perceiving the urban environment. In this journalist’s view, Zargón's painting "portrayed the mortal remains of what had until recently been Argentina's burgeoning industry […] elements that once were the cogs of a now dismantled system of production".¹⁹

The aforementioned exhibition—which took place between October, 1998 and the summer of 1999 at the Centro Cultural Borges—is probably the most significant one in terms of the artist's career development, a turning point that offered testimony to the resolute conclusion of the experiences of the decade that was drawing to a close as well as hints of the future investigation that she would carry well into the decade of 2000. We have already mentioned that the vertical strata that accentuated the autonomy of each painting began to be replaced by sequences of parallel modules that echoed viewers’ physical movement in the space in the last paintings from 1997. This syntax became dominant in the new exhibition. On the one hand, the use of modules ruptured hyperrealism's illusionistic mirror by fragmenting the image, and on the other, it accentuated its presence—above all when the paintings were set directly on the floor—by mimicking the same scale and position of viewers’ bodies in the actual space of the exhibition hall. Viviana Zargón explored this new system’s diverse formal and iconographic possibilities. It could be a whole image arbitrarily segmented (Serie de SOK) or discontinuous fragments brought together to be "reunited" in the imaginary projection of the viewer’s gaze. While in the former the integrity of a single scheme of perspective favors the traditional sensation of a "window" looking out on an exterior, in Once Orsay, where pieces were set on the floor at a 90-degree angle, the artist plays with an ambiguous, back and forth relationship between an illusory vanishing point and the contingency of the actual physical space. At times, as in Bash, no optical reconstruction of single perspective remains as a possibility: photography’s fragmentary, sequential logic dominates the image. In order to accentuate this effect, the artist repeats the device of inserting monochrome panels alongside each module; however—in an essential variation—the panels are no longer paintings, but pieces made of metal, a material commonly found in factory constructions.

She begins to take an interest in structures made of glass, iron and steel, survivors of the Industrial Revolution's functional architecture. In spite of repeated requests, she is unable to gain permission to photograph the depots at the Retiro rail yard. She then turns to photographic reproductions of the old Orsay train station and the Palais des Machines (for the Serie de Olam), which she combined with her own shots of ruins found in the old Argentinean railway station, which would soon be remodeled and transformed into the Tren de la Costa tourist attraction. In this way, French monuments come to coexist in the same exhibition space with local ruins: another conspicuous example of this is the lateral view of the old Molinos Río de la Plata building, today turned into a glamorous icon of the new Puerto Madero neighborhood (Serie de SOK). This broadened use of iconography is significant because it is a clearer indication of exactly what it is that her painting takes from photography, and also in what sense it transcends it. The use of black and white and hyperrealist visual language are fundamental, since they evoke traits of photography, but this is less important as a specific imprint of a particular reality than it is as a generalized accessory to memory. In other words, in the cultural climate of the late ‘90s, Zargón's commitment focused not so much on recollection as a means of archaeological conservation for this or that building, but on the renewed view of both recent and distant history that these multiple instances of industrial ruins were beginning to stimulate. In much the same way as ruins, photography is a fragment that operates as a vehicle for memory, but its relationship to a reconstruction of the past is a complex one. The syntax of fragmentation that Viviana Zargón utilizes signifies much more than a simply formal resolution. It denotes the very nature of memory, which also proceeds by way of a changing, selective ordering of fragmentary remains.²⁰

The shadows and highlights of a new decade

In 1999, Zargón produced the first version of Villa Flandria. This work is fundamental because it inaugurated a new model for her paintings and it arrived by way of an archetypical example of Argentina’s industrial utopia (the Flandria cotton mill, 1929-1996). The interior space of the warehouse is represented in accordance with the classic rules of centralized, Renaissance perspective, a device that coincides perfectly—as has been noted ²¹—with the photographic camera's monocular register. It is fundamental because it very specifically introduces the opposite of the fragmented paintings described earlier: while they summarize memory's labor as a kind of subjective, transitory puzzle, this piece turns to objectivity's code, in other words, to the equivalence between representation and reality. Although the single image in Villa Flandria generates the sensation of being in the presence of an illusory space, the earlier pieces evidenced the painting's physical presence. The copious amount of work produced from 2000 to present is all based on a dialectic exploration of these two models.

While continuing to work with famous ruins such as the Orsay train station or the Palais des Machines, Zargón also increases her photographic register of local points of reference: along with Flandria, what is left of the factory and the oil warehouse (1924-1992) that would later turn into the Ciudad Cultural Konex; the abandoned site that used to be the headquarters for Obras Sanitarias de la Nación (National Water Works); the old Hudson brewery, before it was converted into an urban planning project for real estate investment, among many others. The artist makes explicit reference to the exact sites in her titles at times, but more frequently uses generic terms (Astillero [Shipyard], Destilería [Distillery], etc.) or divergent associations. We have already mentioned the importance of documentary photography, and also how the artist transcends it. This is not an archive. It is more than an extensive undertaking to gather case studies; her work is based on intensive investigation of pictorial variations on a recurring and relatively delimited iconographic repertoire. There is something vast about Zargón's work, but it lies in how she brings a potentially infinite universe of nuances to mind. In the interests of keeping this text something short of infinite, we propose concluding by highlighting two relevant structural variations.

The first concerns light, the raw material of photography and the key or structure for the distribution of painting's scale of values. In achromatic works such as Zargón's, it is logical to think of the importance of its luminary key. This role is also already clear in Villa Flandria. In the 16^th century, the transition to the High Renaissance implied— among other things—that the rules of diminishing perspective were not only formal (related to drawing) but also tonal, or "atmospheric": paint had to be applied in such a way that would suggest the waning visibility produced by increasing distance from the observer's point of view. In this canvas, Zargón obeys the rules of perspective in terms of drawing, but subverts its criteria in the gradation of light. In effect, the foreground is plunged in dense gloom while the lightest values are found in the background. In the large windows that occupy the place of the vanishing point, a Renaissance artist would have generated an effect of suction toward the horizon; here, a blinding light blocks the gaze instead. From 2004 on, Zargón pushes this proposition to its fullest extent, to eventually elaborate a dialog between perspective’s illusionist box and a material-based tradition of monochrome black in works such as Kon-fin or Ausente (Absent). Where in other pieces she had handled the difficulties of memory by way of coexisting fragments, here she works with qualities of the gaze, which is challenged by conditions of excessive light or shadow. Once again, it is clear that there are meanings at play that go far beyond mere formal devices: multiple associations arise out of the intersection between darkness, ruin and memory.

These meanings also address a new historical context. In the context of the crisis in 2001, factory ruins would more or less inevitably allude to society’s overall protest against neoliberal policies that had dismantled industry. In a new political era that advocates recovering Argentina's industrial project, however, these remains become more ambiguous. Effectively, it is as yet unclear exactly how to implement this "recovery" in the long term within a global economy no longer organized according to historical (1929-1976) industrial models. Meanwhile, conservative arguments presaging a continuation of cyclical crises further confuse public opinion. Viviana Zargón does not elaborate her insistent works in order to make a judgment call on these issues, but to indicate the importance of these material remnants and to suggest that they are still on the verge of telling us something. She shows us that the past may well become enigmatic, but cannot be simply discarded.

There is still more to say regarding the theme of light in her paintings. It is well known that during the 17^th century the baroque style countered evenly handled Renaissance atmospheres with discontinuous lighting situations: large dimly lit areas were punctuated by specific zones of light. These two models have generated intense debate throughout representation’s entire history, and both coexist in Villa Flandria. Just as mist and relative visibility were exploited by romantic painters or pictorial photographers, objective clarity continues to hold its own in architects’ drawings, for example. Viviana Zargón uses this differentiation to create a play between two successive versions of a single building. The structure is the old port mill and silos from the beginning of the 20^th century, renovated to become the glamorous Hotel Faena in mid-2000. The first version was produced in 2001. She had a photograph of the old granary, but its imminent destiny was already known. The building appears to rise up like a romantic era ruin in the midst of a vaporous, undefined landscape: with a certain irony, she titled the piece Hotel Felicity (Happiness Hotel). In 2004, after the Faena had been inaugurated, she painted the same building again: this time, it stands clearly detailed in an empty, neutral space, as if rendered with an AutoCAD program. We can consider its unblemished beauty to be the result of having its history erased.

The second variation will lead to a new approach to photography. This process took place between 2000 and 2003, while she was working with a shot of an electric junction box found on the abandoned grounds of the old Hudson brewery. First, she painted it as always, in a photo-realist manner, but this time she situated it on a completely smooth background plane. In the painting of the Hotel Faena mentioned recently, the handling of the background was an extreme synthesis, but did not go so far as to contradict the logic of the building’s volumetric perspective: it rises up unmistakably resting on a supporting surface, contained within illusionistic space. Now, however, that is completely removed and the junction box—more as an object than as architecture—floats in the middle of the painting’s surface, as if it were a photograph cut out and pasted there. For the first time, painting imitates the digital cut and paste procedure, and Zargón, following this line of orientation even further, also introduces for the first time a sequential repetition of the same motif. While the relationship between painting and photography had, until then, respected the unity of a tableau, the technical media’s ability to be reproduced now pushed painting toward the logic of an archive or typological catalog. The experience with the electric junction box would culminate in the introduction of photo-etching and mounting the pieces as a series of modules. We are now just one step away from her Objetos inútiles (Useless Objects), which would expand Zargón’s work definitively toward using photography as a medium in and of itself, a development that Rodrigo Alonso analyzes elsewhere in this publication. ²²

Included in this same working process are paper folding procedures that the artist uses in order to translate the cuts she had already used in pictorial polyptych pieces to the material aspect of photographic prints. Zargón explained this relationship in the show Índice, serie, secuencia, inventario (Index, Series, Sequence, Inventory), held at the Gachi Prieto gallery in 2011, where she presented one same image embodied in turn on each of these supports. The painted version consisted of 16 modules, occupying a corner of the exhibition space, and the photographic version was on folded paper, shown on a shelf: where the former piece mixed painting with its spatial installation, the latter was simultaneously photography, sculptural object and artist’s book. The source image was obtained by way of a digital distortion of a documentary photograph of the Palais des Machines under construction. The truth is that the artist knowingly took advantage of an involuntary error produced in her computer, as if the machine had somehow interpreted her gaze on a subconscious level.

Who are you writing to, Viviana?

Art history recognizes hyperrealism as a pictorial or sculptural style that imitates photography’s automatic (nonselective) level of detail. In 1931, Walter Benjamin already stated that photographic images introduced something that was impossible for painting, in as much as it is delimited by the human eye: an optical "subconscious". Accordingly, while realist painting handled the issue of representation related to modernity's idea of reality, hyperrealism emerged as one way to confront the so frequently discussed phenomenon of simulacra in postmodern culture, awash in mechanically reproduced images. This style started out in North America during the ‘70s as a derivative of Pop Art. Recovering the very painting that Warhol had eliminated from his canvases became a paradox, given that the return of such classical technical virtuosity and skill suddenly found itself without anything very singular or meaningful to paint. Visions, topics and customs trapped within the omnipresent logic of consumerism constituted the definitive, voluntarily banal iconography of North American hyperrealism from that period. Once removed from those coordinates of time and place, hyperrealist language would take on a different meaning.

In Argentina, Viviana Zargón utilized it for the first time in 1995, in order to introduce images of port area ruins in her painting. Later in the decade, her work, like that of many others, was being interpreted as an expression of the devastating effects that neoliberal regimes of deindustrialization and privatization of public patrimony had left on Argentinean society. The urbanization of Puerto Madero in particular stood as a symbol of a society of spectacle based on collective amnesia, in addition to embodying the immense power of corporate real estate interests. Zargón's monochrome paintings showed a world laid to waste.

Her awareness of this significance arrived gradually. As mentioned earlier, there were personal motives at work at the outset. Years before, in 1985, a dialog between a young, newly arrived Viviana and three great Argentinean painters took place. While Luis Felipe Noé and Alejandro Puente attempted to comprehend in what way some form of continuity might be articulated between her “calligraphy” from Barcelona and the new works produced in Buenos Aires, Fernando Fazzolari was interested in something else. ¿A quién le escribes, Viviana? (Who are you writing to, Viviana?) (It would be some time later that she discovered the similarity between those strokes and the electrocardiograms that her father was undergoing at the time). The question was not directed toward the achievements she had already acquired in painting, but rather addressed the form that her potential might acquire in the future.²³