Roberto Plate

It all began with a public bathroom. Specifically, a fake bathroom that Roberto Plate, a young conceptual artist, installed in 1968 at the Instituto Di Tella. While the toilets did not work, the walls provided a place where, in the form of graffiti, visitors could express their basest instincts and more. Much of the walls’ scrawlings condemned the military dictatorship under General Onganía, who eventually ordered the exhibition to be shut down. When, in response, the other artists in the show burned their works at the entrance, Onganía then closed the institute itself—arguably among the first sites of Argentinian contemporary art—for good.

Perhaps it is this narrative’s significance in conceptual art’s history that led Andrés Duprat, the director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, to call Plate an “essential” artist. And while there is a partial reconstruction of that banned bathroom and documentation of two other installations, the largest percentage of the works on view in the anthological show “Buenos Aires–Paris–Buenos Aires” are paintings: around one hundred in total, most produced in Paris, where the artist escaped after his work was censored. And Plate has always considered himself an easel painter. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he took exile in painting.

Indeed, Peinture (Paint), 2012, is one of the large canvases on view (and the titles of many of the other works make reference to the act of painting). Depicted, close up, is a palette whose daubs of paint blend into brushstrokes. Representation and abstraction, here, become twinned in a single pursuit: the painted blotch. In this, as in almost all of his pieces, Plate creates a new paradigm around the figure of the classical artist, without diminishing spontaneous pleasure in either the making or viewing of his work.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.