Galleria del Naviglio, Milan Private Collection, Buenos Aires Private Collection, Europe Private Collection, New York
Exhibited
Milan, Galleria del Naviglio, Disegni di Roberto Aizenberg, 9 December, 1982 - 5 January, 1983
Literature
Disegni di Roberto Aizenberg, exh. cat., Galleria del Naviglio, Milan, 1982, n.p. (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
Roberto Aizenberg is best known for his painstakingly executed paintings of isolated buildings composed of simplified, geometric forms. These works, of which he produced less than fifty in this lifetime, reveal what could be perceived as idealized utopian landscapes or alternatively as uninhabited towns filled only with monolithic towers.
Aizenberg, the son of Russian immigrants, was born in Argentina in 1928. As a young man he studied architecture, but his career path changed course after seeing paintings by the celebrated Argentine Surrealist, Juan Batlle Planas, who later became his mentor. These distinct creative interests led Aizenberg to forge a unique visual style that synthesized Surrealism with architecture, imbuing his works with formal compositional structures but also an eerie sense of loneliness and dreamlike fantasy.
This particular work is one from a series of drawings that explore the human figure. The drawing’s surface is composed of familiar planes, giving the figure’s clothing an architectural quality. The blank, empty eyes and Mona Lisa-like smile make the figure mysterious but also inviting. Aizenberg chose to ground the man in space by using simple foreshortening lines to form a box-like room from which the figure emerges towards the viewer. This drawing exemplifies Aizenberg’s prominence in the Latin American artistic tradition that vacillates between Surrealism and geometric abstraction, found in the work of other prominent artists like Guther Gerzso and Roberto Matta.
