THE TEACHER'S CRITICAL LOOK

Smoke. 1974.

Etching and aquatint on paper. Measures. Print box: 33 x 47.3 cm. Paper: 53.8 x 70 cm. In graphite pencil and in the author's handwriting, the copy number, 58/65 and the signature: “C. Alonso 74”. Reproduced in Carlos Alonso (Gaglianone Art Editions, 1986).

As in the cartoons of a comic strip, Alonso poses five scenes within boxes. In the first, the face of a young and beautiful woman, caressed by another's wrinkled hand. The other three present variants of the same composition: a young woman in profile, to the left, and below and to the right, an old man. In the first of the three, both characters are a bundle of intestines and amorphous volumes of meat. In the following, the woman is bald and displays with her fingers the "V" of victory, or in our Argentine political history, the Peronist "V" born of "Perón Vuelve", inspired in response to the graffiti that They appeared on the planes used by the Argentine Navy to bomb Plaza de Mayo on June 16, 1955, a short vé under a cross, alluding to "Christ wins", the motto of the Catholic currents in conflict with Peronism at that time. Beneath the woman the old man now has a baroque wig, while her claw-hand grips her shoulder. In the fourth vignette, the woman has hair, a bare chest, and with her hand she now outlines a “horns” sign. Next to her, the man is bald and with a pacifier. Finally, below, a larger scene shows us both characters, as if in a different time from the moment they posed for that montage immortalized in four snapshots. The old man, completely lined with wrinkles, wears an elegant suit and smokes a cigar whose smoke only allows us to see one of his sinister eyes. Beside him the woman is naked and bald. In the background, on a glass table, some packs of cigarettes and a mannequin with a wig.

This engraving, made in 1974, mediates between two milestones in Alonso's work that articulate a period, which began with the illustration of El matadero by Esteban Echeverría in 1966 and ended with the installation Anonymous Hands, a work that was never exhibited at the National Museum of Fine Arts in 1976. A period framed between Onganía's "Argentine Revolution" in 1966 and the beginning of the "National Reorganization Process" in 1976, the last military dictatorship, a black stage in Argentine history that meant exile for him in Rome and Madrid and an irreparable loss in his family. Production in this time will be a bloody display of power, embodied in a central metaphor: meat. Alberto Giudici, curator of the great exhibition “Hay que comer” from 2004 and 2005 in Buenos Aires and Valencia, writes that meat is “a metaphor for Argentina and a torn metaphor for the human body repeatedly sullied, pierced, flayed. The cow-man symbiosis is a sign, it is an alphabet of a writing that recreates the tragic national history and portrays the ominous impudence of the powerful who made an acquired right of the body-merchandise” [1]. The flesh, together with these two characters, the rich old man -a landowner, a powerful man- and the bald woman next to the wig, are elements that are reiterated in Alonso's production of this period, and that we can observe in his series. “The won and the lost” and “You have to eat”. Incarnations of the tragedy of his time, and unfortunately and prophetically, that of the future. Three years after our engraving, in 1977, his daughter disappeared; Alonso was already in exile in Europe.

Carlos Alonso (Tunuyán, Mendoza, 1929), painter, cartoonist and engraver, at the age of fourteen he entered the National Academy of Fine Arts in the city of Mendoza. His teachers were Sergio Sergi, Lorenzo Domínguez, Francisco Bernareggi and Ramón Gómez Cornet. He received his first prize at the Salón de Estudiantes in 1947, and in 1953 he exhibited at the Viau Gallery, in Buenos Aires, which provided him with the financial means to travel, a year later, to Europe, where he exhibited in Paris and Madrid. In 1951 he won first prize at the San Rafael Painting Salon (Mendoza), the North Salon (Santiago del Estero) and drawing at the North Salon (Tucumán). He is a prolific book illustrator; among other titles, The slaughterhouse, Creole Ballads, Juan's Anthology, the Divine Comedy, The Rabid Toy, Irene, Anatomy Lesson, and Hand in Hand stand out. In 1957 he was the winner of the contest organized by the Emecé publishing house to illustrate the second part of Don Quixote de la Mancha and Martín Fierro (1959).

Note:

1. Alberto Giudici, La carne como metáfora, in “Carlos Alonso. You have to eat”, IVAM, Valencia, 2005.