FERNANDO MAZA
1

I was born in Buenos Aires in 1936. Art activity came naturally to me, beginning at an early age. At first I studied informally and learned from private lessons, people I knew and objects and scenes that I saw. At thirteen, I began to visit the studio of an old fashioned painter once a week (for him, art had stopped with Van Gogh); He ushered me into the techniques of drawing and painting.

After my father died, I had to go to work in an office for some years and as it wasn‘t possible to go to college to study architecture, I became interested in poetry, writing, film making and the mysteries of Buenos Aires night life. At the age of twenty, I was commissioned to do some illustrations for a weekly magazine, and became determined to paint full time and to become a “modern artist.” With a lot of assurance based on ignorance and a lack of awareness of the difficulties ahead, I took the plunge. The artists I met gave me hints and advice, and in 1959 I joined a group of young abstract painters “los informalistas”, who were dedicated to lyrical abstraction (in the mood of Tapies, Millares, and Burri, for instance). We wrote manifestos, made noisy statements and exhibited our works. That year I had two solo exhibitions and sold some of my work.

My first trip to New York, in January 1960, marked a large change in my life. I can’t explain why I chose New York when most of the artists I knew were going to Europe. This move, like many other things in my life, had more to do with an intuition than a theory. Whatever my reasons for going, New York was a big and stimulating shock. I ended up staying for four years instead of the three months I had originally planned, and in September 1960 I received a grant from the Pan American Union to study printmaking at the Pratt Graphic Center. I studied there for about two years.

In New York, I saw for the first time art that I had only known from reproduction.
I reacted to what I saw around me, in ways that sometimes reassured me and sometimes left me more confused. Painting was the only way to clear the path. Maybe as a way of closing off the visual flurry around me, I began to simplify. By 1962, my abstract paintings were becoming simpler, almost monochromatic, dark, almost black, inscribed loosely in an axial symmetry. (Although I wasn’t following Rothko or Reinhardt, the fact that there was some analogy between my search and theirs was reassuring to me. ) Someone described my painting of this time as a “marble mirror” in which the differences of color-hue-value were almost imperceptible to the naked eye. I found that I was abandoning my more spontaneous ways and learning to distrust my natural facility. I was enclosing the experience of painting within myself, excluding the Pharisees. Yet, even though I had arrived at an esthetically correct synthesis, I knew it expressed only a small portion of my potential, of the unknown that I wanted to bring out.

In October of that year I went to Europe for the first time, staying ten months, and when I returned to New York I found that I was bored with the formal correctness of my work. It was during that painful period of skin changing that the way I now paint began to appear. I was reaching out, and during the search for new ways, I spent time looking at buildings in downtown Manhattan, and signs, remembering my grandfather’s architectural studio and my uncle’s:blueprints, the drafting materials there. All that, laced with a hint of self-mockery, led me to establish formal relations between typography and the facades of buildings. I did this through free association, in a loose way, with a sort of poetic irony. At the same time, I had chosen to impose a discipline by working against the grain and deliberately refusing to exploit my natural, easy ways with materials and color.