Emilio Rodríguez-Larraín: Ancestral Landscapes

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Emilio Rodríguez-Larraín (b. 1928, Lima, Peru - d. 2015, Lima, Peru) was an artist who studied and lived in Europe for three decades and whose practice included painting, sculpture, architecture, and land art. He drew from indigenous, pre-colonial, and geometric Latin American sources while inserting them in his production. In Europe, he became friends with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, who influenced his artistic transition to paint with the “guided fate,” in which the artist minimally intervenes with the work and lets chance, or nature, be the protagonist. Towards the end of Rodríguez-Larraín's career, he created large, site-specific sculptures and land art that were inspired by his training as an architect and interest in the environment.

In the mid-1950s, Rodríguez-Larraín emerged as a pioneering proponent of geometric abstraction in Peru and was among the first to exhibit such works in Lima.[i]  Although Peruvian artist Fernando de Szyszlo exhibited abstract paintings in 1951, Rodríguez-Larraín’s hard-edged style diverged from Szyszlo’s softer, more organic works, and marked his bold endorsement of the post-war international fervor for constructivism. Irregular geometric shapes rendered in vibrant contrasting colors form intricate patterns in Rodríguez-Larraín’s geometric abstractions from the 1950s. While firmly associated with the international propensity for such imagery, his compositions are unique in their subtle balance of shapes painted in intense hues several shades removed from primary colors. His wine-tinged reds, sky blues, autumn oranges, and golden yellows scintillate as the sharp edges of forms align. His arrangement of flat colored shapes establishes balance between rhythmic striated bands, half circles, angles in varying sizes, and invented forms that are simultaneously precisely composed and highly dynamic.

“The finished paintings, luminous, vaguely geometric patterns contrasted with black pools of fear and despair, present an integrated totality. We are reminded…of Aztec design and South American color, but the reference is almost always a spiritual one rather than a tangible, visual one.”

-Rodriguez-Larrain, Staempfli Gallery, January 12-30, 1965, New York

Rodríguez-Larraín’s reputation took off in the 1960s. During this period, he lived in various European cities and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, and the United States, where he was represented by the Staemplfi Gallery located at 47 E. 77^th St. in New York. In 1960, Rodríguez-Larraín met Marcel Duchamp and the two artists became close friends and collaborators. Duchamp introduced Rodríguez-Larraín to key players in the global art world and nurtured his experimental practice. Major museums and collectors began paying attention to his work; he participated in four group shows at MoMA, and both MoMA and Nelson Rockefeller acquired his work. While he resided primarily in Europe, Rodríguez-Larraín made several visits to Peru (1963, 1964, and 1967), reinforcing the relevance of abstract art in his home country. In Lima, the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo (Institute of Contemporary Art) had replaced the Galería de Lima as the leading tastemaker and exhibition venue in the city. The IAC organized the Peruvian delegation to the 1964 Venice Biennale by choosing the most important abstract artists to represent the country (Rodríguez-Larraín [who was also previously selected for the 1960 Venice Biennale], Alberto Dávila, Jorge Eielson, Jorge Piqueras, Joaquín Roca-Rey, and Fernando de Szyszlo), validating ancestralismo, a trend in contemporary Andean painting that sought inspiration in the abstract motifs, colors, and patterns found in pre-Columbian art, on the world stage. Rodríguez-Larraín also held a joint exhibition at the IAC with the Italian abstract painter Guido Strazza that same year. It was Rodríguez-Larraín's 1967 exhibition at the editorial house Francisco Moncloa where he exhibited thirty-two works created between 1959-1965 that marked his local triumph, however.

In 1959, inspired by informalist movements in Europe, Rodríguez-Larraín’s forms became more organic, his palette shifted toward earth tones, and texture became a major element in his compositions. He began employing tempera and wax and burning and scratching the surface of his canvases to create new effects. He often worked on a deep black ground, slowly building layers of color and pattern. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Europe and the U.S., Rodríguez-Larraín’s approach was not gestural; instead, he painted intricate linear patterns, rich mixtures of color, and meticulous details. Occasionally, his titles alluded to Peruvian culture and geography (i.e., Magic Mamapacha, Ancestral Landscape, Viceroy, or Ranrahirca), loosely aligning his work with ancestralismo. While Rodríguez-Larraín did not directly emulate specific objects or archaeological sites, his forms prompted viewers to imagine a visual connection across time and to perceive references to the archaic and mythical in his work. Andean textile traditions were often a source of inspiration. In La Ventana Alucinada (The Hallucinated Window), for example, the multiple lines emanating from a central gridded square resemble the cords used in quipus, Incan communication devices made of knotted string that were used to record and transmit information.

“His marbles and woods emit the restrained luminosity of altars mastered by geodesic religions […] Within the masterful assemblages, internal clarity initiates the slow vibrations of an awakened self-understanding. Weights tilt. Oblique angles offer problems so disproportionate that only a second-degree geometrization will be able to permute interstitial ethers and visual thoughts.”

-Jean Dewasne, Emilio R. Larrain. Sculptures – Peintures, L’Enseigne du Cerceau, 1975, Paris

The 1970s was the decade of sculpture. In 1969, Rodríguez-Larraín produced his first metal sculptures and continued creating wooden objects. In 1971, he won the Prix de l’Europe in Ostend, Belgium, for his geometric painting Trois Tigres Triste (Three Sad Tigers), where he was one of 600 artists competing and the only Latin American winner. During this period, he held individual and group exhibitions in Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Norway, and Peru, which included his first solo show of sculptures at the Galerie à l’Enseigne du Cerceau in Paris in 1975. One year later he received a Guggenheim grant to start working on his series Cuadros del Cielo (Sky Paintings). The jury included Dore Ashton, Donald Judd, Robert Motherwell, and Frank Stella, and Rodríguez-Larraín's success was a testament to his status as international abstract artist. The 1970s also saw his participation in another Venice Biennale (1972) and the XXX Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.

Rodríguez-Larraín’s color palette became more vibrant and energetic in the paintings he completed in the 1970s. But his primary innovation during this decade was in sculpture. Creating small scale objects out of wood and steel, Rodríguez-Larraín returned to the geometric forms of his paintings from the 1950s. His sculptures, however, were symmetrical and balanced, minimalist objects based on the core geometries of cubes and pyramids. Often made in multiple editions using different materials, Rodríguez-Larraín’s precise designs reflect his early training as an architect. The refined craftsmanship, weightiness, and high-quality materials of these objects imply that they hold iconic or mythical significance. Rodríguez-Larraín’s Sky Painting series of 1976-77 went in a different direction altogether. Employing the surrealist technique of controlled chance, he treated canvases with casein then dyed them with dirt and regional fruit and left them to dry on his roof for three months. Inspired by the resulting stains on the surface, Rodríguez-Larraín superimposed shapes, lines, and collage elements to suggest celestial maps. The contrasting techniques of his meticulously planned sculptures and the chance effects in his paintings represent the two poles of artistic experimentation that characterized the era.

"Dorothy Canning Miller was the first professionally trained curator hired at the Museum of Modern Art, which she joined in 1934, joining in a staff of thirteen (including a receptionist, a switchboard operator, and a man at the front desk who sold postcards and catalogues). In a field dominated by men, Miller’s rapid evolution into America’s first museum curator of contemporary art was not without setbacks, but she persevered: at MoMA she became the pivotal curator of her generation, championing American artists at a time when few curators were paying any attention to them."

-Wendy Jeffers, Former Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Archives of American Art

“I think that, more than provoking us with his sculpture, using both ancient and new tools, he seeks to reintegrate us into a dialogue with this vast arid and amazing Peruvian coast where many other ‘clay machines’ still lie—invisible…he makes use of a supposed ‘contemporary language’ to unravel mysteries, myths and pre-Hispanic symbols.”

-Marco Limenes, “La Máquina de Arcilla: La nueva hueca de Huanchaco,” Si, Feb. 1988, Lima

In 1981, Rodríguez-Larraín returned to Lima, bringing most of the work he created in Europe with him. There, he began focusing on monumental sculpture and earthworks, constructing pieces, such as Apacheta along the Pan-American highway in 1986 and La máquina de arcilla (The Clay Machine) for the III Bienal de Trujillo on the beach of Huanchaquito. He showed at the Galería 9, the Galeria Camino Brent, and the Galería Forum, new venues for contemporary art exhibitions in the city, and participated in a retrospective of Peruvian abstract art with other prominent artists including Moncloa, Piqueras, and Szyszlo. Rodríguez-Larraín remained engaged with the European art scene and participated in exhibitions in Germany and Spain. In 1985, he received a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) to work on a series of designs for one of his most monumental projects titled Refugios de los Andes (Andean Refuges). 

In the 1980s, Rodríguez-Larraín turned his attention to designing and building monumental earthworks. Conceived in collaboration with his daughter Sofía, Rodríguez-Larraín’s Andean Refuges consist of plans for thirteen shelters to be built along mountain roads in Peru. While never realized because of the presence of the Shining Path, the designs enlarge structures analogous to his geometric sculptures to a human scale. Employing interlocking positive and negative spaces, these architectural interventions in the landscape recall sacred Incan huacas. Similarly, his site-specific sculpture Apacheta, a cairn constructed of stone, refers to the sacred markers built throughout the region during the Inca empire. Rodríguez-Larraín’s Apacheta consists of a pile of three large craggy rocks in the Ica desert that rise above the coastal landscape, a work that is both a modern intervention and a recollection of past practices. With The Clay Machine, Rodríguez Larraín transitions to a truly monumental scale. Using traditional materials of adobe and mud, Rodríguez-Larraín creates a structure that recalls the pre-Hispanic ruins of Lima, such as Huaca Pucllana and Huaca Huantille. These earthworks push the notion of ancestralismo, a trend in contemporary Andean painting that sought inspiration in the abstract motifs, colors, and patterns found in pre-Columbian art, beyond painting to create structures that resonate with the local landscape and culture. 

“An exceptional artist. It seems that sensitive intuition and a capacity to generate forms are the only things that triggered a creative ability that, ignoring canons, invents its own routines, facilitates the birth of new forms and achieves, in this creative and often endless exercise, works ranging from rigorous and carefully-planned constructions to a mastery and guidance of chance emphasized through a gesture.”

—Elida Roma, “An exceptional artist,” El Comercio, Feb. 2007

Rodríguez-Larraín remained active during the last decades of his life, completing several monumental projects. Most significantly, in 1991, he participated in the exhibition Man Ray and his Friends in Japan, which also included works by renowned modernists such as Duchamp, Ernst, Picasso, Miró, and Breton. In 1992, Rodríguez-Larraín moved to Coral Gables, Florida, but frequently returned to Lima to exhibit. In 1998, he returned to Lima and was granted to opportunity to build one of his Andean Refuges in the garden of the Museo de Arte de Lima (Lima Art Museum) for the Bienal Cosapi de Arte y Empresa (Cosapi Biennial of Art and Buisness). Starting in 1997, several retrospective exhibitions of his work were organized, the most significant of which was held in 2007 at El Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano de Lima (The Peruvian-North American Cultural Institute of Lima). In 2005, his work was recognized with Medalla Ignacio Merino from the Municipalidad de Lima (Ignacio Meriano Medal from the Municipality of Lima), and in 2006, he won the Premio de la Bienal de Pintura Teknoquímica (Teknoquímica Painting Biennial Prize). Rodríguez-Larraín passed away in Lima in 2015.