FERNANDO MAZA
2

In Buenos Aires, where I spent 1964 and 1965, and where my son Gerardo was born, I extended this musing into space, and in my work I began freely combining geometrically structured paintings with wood constructions that sometimes served as a hanger or a base. My palette became brighter, the painting became more geometrical and suggestions of a reality existing within a more ambiguous space started to appear. At one point, certain diagonally striped areas of paintings suggested to me a feeling of perspective that I had not consciously intended. That was the origin of the isometric system that still persists in my work.

I was chosen to represent Argentina in the VIII Sao Paolo Biennale, but I was determined to return to New York to pursue my artistic career. By 1966, I was back in Manhattan with my American wife and son. I had a loft studio on the Bowery and, later, Lafayette Street. During this time, I worked waiting tables in the Village and doing odd carpentry jobs. My wood-and-canvas constructions were becoming more intricate and more arbitrary, and I cultivated the arbitrary and the random.

I participated in various group shows in and out of town, and in 1970 I had my first one-man show since Buenos Aires in 1964. It took place in Caracas, where I showed constructions, shaped-canvas paintings and watercolors on paper. However, that same year I did my last “self-standing” painting and gradually abandoned flat colored surfaces. Now, I no longer resisted my original natural fluidity; instead, I allowed the pure experience of painting to become a current that carried me along with it. The light of Venice and of the Mediterranean appeared. The feeling of a distant sea.

I received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1971, and in 1972 I was invited to the 36th Venice Biennale in the Argentinean pavilion. My paintings attracted a lot of attention at the Biennale; I began to exhibit at the Marie-Louise Jeanneret Gallery in Geneva and also (the relations between art and nationality being somewhat ambiguous) was included in the “Ten Years of American Painting” exhibition in St. Paul de Vence.

Since 1971, I have lived entirely from the sale of my work. In that decade, I was having successful shows in Switzerland, Italy, Spain and France. In 1973, I moved to London, with the intention of painting for an exhibition (which never took place) and to be closer to Mallorca, where my son was living with his mother. I stayed in London for five years, longer than I intended, and moved to Paris in 1978. My daughter
Sara Lou was born there; her mother was an architect living in Paris.