By Martin Craciun

Independent Curator

The Art to Produce

About the Work of Gustavo Genta

“The same way conscious contents can disappear into the unconscious, other contents can emerge out of it”

(C. G. Jung)

The work of Gustavo Genta is multi-informed. Like a fabric, it is intertwining interests, style and approximations on form and expression possibilities of the materials. Genta has succeeded in creating a corpus of works featuring a system of signs, a personal language allowing him to address different supports, media and format, and still maintain a style that identifies him. His works maintain a dialogue with architecture and praise it, subverting the order of these vital spaces in a non trivial way, opening new possible registers to possible monochromatic games and multiple lighting effects.

Gustavo Genta relies in his work on a personal method that is informed by his studies in industrial design, with the will to set up industrial processes together with his team. Serial, rational, safe and optimized processes, which he combines with personal and emotional decisions in order to give his works harmony and balance. His aesthetic investigations drift towards new forms and what he likes to call “families of work”.

Gustavo Genta belongs to a generation who graduated in the years 2000 from the Industrial Design Center of Uruguay. The IDC is a milestone in the history of design in Uruguay, as it prepared a group of young people to a new industrialized world, into which our country had the firm intention to be integrated. In line with the dilemma posed by Pedro Figari in 1919: “either we industrialize or they industrialize us”, Uruguay raised a center of excellence supported in the beginning by international cooperation. With a European-style education, these young people were oriented towards the creation and development of industrial products to be mass-produced on a large scale. Creativity and inventiveness oriented towards definition, creation and development of new objects and products aiming at meeting corporate and private needs.

The Concrete Art Manifesto declared the end of representation. In Buenos Aires in the 40’s, abstract artists were trying to express forms and colors without any relation to objective reality. Tomas Maldonado, incontestable reference in the development of industrial design as a specific discipline, defines design as the cultural assimilation of the technical object. He was part of the group of the Concrete artists looking for a renewal in their profession. The journey of Gustavo Genta is significant, being a singular itinerary from design to artistic abstraction.

Hannah Arendt considered that generally speaking, the people who produce do not understand what they are doing, as they are only part of a process chain necessary for the production of something. In the same time, the term craftsmanship is frequently associated with a way of life that has been replaced by the industrialized society, along with the production of handmade objects with a personal stamp. In The Craftsman (2008), Richard Sennett argues that craftsmanship describes a basic and long lasting human impulse: the mere desire to make things right. The sociologist understands craftsmanship as the ability to make things right through the knowledge of the materials and technical skills usually associated to the power of our imagination. Here is where the production of Gustavo Genta resonates, in its pursuit of refinement, its functional dexterity and its material qualities, eventually leading to an aesthetic investigation, projecting itself, beyond the object, towards the field of art.

Work groups, “families” as Genta expresses it, bodies of works using common formal and technical resources, production lines in a daily evolving and growing universe. “Making is thinking.” Material searches, formal and technical developments are concatenated in pieces making new works possible and opening new paths. In the making, he finds the expression of a form of thinking and a formal refinement, ending up producing an aesthetic research in the production processes.

His works levitate with style: Genta builds forms that “are”, that do not boast about hermetic messages; forms that are neither intending to abstract from natural phenomena nor trying to represent them, and that immediately gratify the viewer.

For more than a century, abstract hanging sculpture has been approached by the successive avant-gardes and features the key contribution of a group of prominent Latin American artists, who extended the limits of a fascinating language. French curator Matthieu Poirier writes that these works share a same vocation about dynamic spacialization, proper to the modern eye. This common endeavor of the past century searching to escape gravity can be seen in Genta’s translucent sculptures: almost without inert mass, their small mirrors creating shadows and twinkles, these works are “sensitive to their immediate environment”.

The work of Genta is not short of references to the history of art, especially investigations around optic phenomena, serial art (repetition of formal elements) and kinetic art on its Latin-American side. It evokes the experiences of Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela, 1923-2005) and the sculptures of Gertrud Goldschmidt, Gego (Germany, 1912-1994). Though Genta does not reference his work to a development fed by the history of art, the links are necessary and pertinent in order to frame his work within a collective, sensitive and consistent construct of contributions from a group of artists who embarked on the adventure of rethinking artistic forms and formats from our continent. The sculptures of Genta remind us somehow and with some distance of the wire sculptures of Leon Ferrari (Argentina 1920 – 2013): Babel Tower, (1961), Planet (1979), and also in a special relation with the instruments realized by Ferrari during his stay in Sao Paulo in the 80s: “artifacts to draw sounds, destined to create facts or sums of musical, visual and tactile facts” or, as Ferrari himself describes them “musical instruments dancing their own music”.

Genta considers the exhibition as an archive, that presents the momentary state of an ongoing experimental process to which the artist subscribes with emphatic devotion: the work in his studio seen as the center of the artist’s research and operations. “The play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes joy” said Johannes Itten, Swiss painter, designer, professor who was part of the Bauhaus school and lectured at HfG school in Ulm.

Genta’s investigations and researches arise from a personal restlessness, a free spirit that finds sensitive worlds in the materials and produce objects transcending superficial values, proposing form as beauty. His practice presents ideas and sensations, and transforms them, as the Swiss architect, artist and designer Max Bill said, into “visible substance”.