Artist and scientist. Vertebrator of experiences. Alchemist and shaman, cook and bricklayer, stonemason, carpenter and intellectual. Argentinean, son of Italian immigrants, lover of his Latin American land, committed to his time, his country and his community..

Víctor Grippo (Junín, 1936 - Buenos Aires, 2002) pursues with his work the transformation of man and society, combining ethics and aesthetics to reach a degree of consciousness in which "art is an exact state of man". And he demonstrates this empirically by redefining the potato, a poor food of Latin American origin, the plant that conquered Europe in the 16th century, and establishing an analogy between the electrical energy it produces and the cognitive capacity of the human mind. From there, "the assimilation of the potato with the stone, the starting point of all wisdom in the alchemical tradition, in a game of allegories, legitimizes man as a thinking and creative being" (Jorge Glusberg).

The politically charged climate of Buenos Aires in the 1970s is also a time of great ideological and cultural effervescence. Grippo is part of the Grupo de los Trece led by Glusberg, at the CayC Art and Communication Center. "In the historical context of the Di Tella Institute and some galleries, Grippo's major affinity, who resides in La Plata, is aligned with the still unnamed conceptualism." (Ana Longoni). In 1972, as part of the exhibition Systems Art, Grippo presents Analogy I. This is the first work in which he uses the potato as an energy-producing material, in its relation to human consciousness. This will be followed by others, such as Time, 1991, or The potato gilds the potato, the conscience illuminates the conscience, 1978, where the author reestablishes the equation art+science+metaphysics to constitute a single quest. In Paints,1975-76, we see the potato germinating in the moonlight, levitating and being chiseled by the sculptor in search of the soul of the stone. At ST, 1966, two oil paintings on canvas depict the world of modern work: machines: circuits that form a system that is later transposed to the symbolic language of the author, as evidenced by germinal works such as NH3, 1971, or Hypotheses on the modification of the photographic process, Grippo reflects on the value of photography as a chemical and artistic process. Each new work is a poetic and scientific experiment in itself, a segment of meaning that contributes one more piece of information to the demonstration of the general system that shapes it. "A mark on another mark, a management of inscription, not of cancellation, never of closure". (Marcelo Pacheco). In Some trades, 1976, "beyond being a true hymn to work as a constitutive element of man, the artist tries to dissolve the traditional scales of value between art and craftsmanship in an image of reciprocity" (Guy Brett).

All in motion is the title of Victor Grippo's first solo exhibition in Madrid, at the gallery 1 Mira Madrid. Because of its forcefulness and singularity, it has a museographic ambition, offering a new vision of the artist. The title of the exhibition alludes to All in progress, (Index of the general movement of beings and things).The exhibition, 1973, points to the internal mechanism of Grippo's work in full ignition. This exhibition represents a key moment for Grippo's work, in which a new opening of its meaning occurs, among others: the exchange between the human being and the plant being, which prefigures essential ideas related to the current ecological conflict.

At Life, Death, Resurrection, 1980, now in the collection of MOMA NYC, the artist points to an inverse birth, in which the force of the gases generated by the putrefaction of the beans is stronger than the lead, exploding those elemental geometric shapes that contain them. An allegorical game in which the natural vital value (the beans) defeats the inert (lead). For Grippo, the scientific is originally included in the artistic, as it was for Lucretius. De Rerum Natura obeys to a time in which physics and poetics are the same thing, a link that modernity will split. The author turns to alchemy as an ancient branch of modern physics and chemistry. This operates in his work as an internal logic, a symbolic undercurrent that coheses it. "Grippo does not polemicize in the terms proposed by the cultural debate of his time (...) his option is to create a reservoir of values from which the imagination can try out new ways of thinking the world". (Andrea Giunta)

 In 1981, the plumb line appeared for the first time in the work Opposites (Opposites-Contact-Union) and begins an extensive series that the artist developed until the end of his life, whose central theme is Equilibrium: Relief (Subtle), 1983. During the eighties the author produces a series of reliefs in which the value of the rose - symbol of transformation, of resurrection - its vital permanence, contrasts and interacts with the value of the inert in lead. An extensive series of Dibujos1972-2002, complements the line of work developed in sculpture and outlines new ideas.

Silence points to a timeless metaphysical space with white plaster and wood volumes of hidden meaning, immersed in a suspended calm: Fencing the light, 1989. Comments to the idea of progress coexist with a visionary hope in which "action and contemplation will be a single peaceful act, accompanying nature in its unity (Victor Grippo). At Anonymous1998-2001, the human figure has become shapeless, expressionless, almost lifeless, as opposed to that lively and joyful community that surrounded the oven.

The curatorial action Ritual of Bread and Ashes, 2015, directed by the author of this text and edited in collaboration with Benito Macías, as a visual essay filmed on video, is part of the XII Havana Biennial and arises from the proposal of Nidia Olmos, in her desire to name the place where the artist's ashes rest. At the same time, the reactivation of the work Construction of the popular bread baking oven, 1972, the film was censored and destroyed two days after its creation in a central square in Buenos Aires. With the oven in Cuba the bread was baked and distributed among passers-by as a gift, where it remains today for the use of the community. The bread was baked and distributed among passers-by as a gift, where it remains today for the use of the Community. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his Essay on the Gift. Form and function of exchange analyzes how the acts of giving, receiving and giving back create a circular mechanism that strengthens social cohesion, a sort of transforming micropolitics, thus the work of Victor Grippo.

(Excerpt from the publication, Madrid, 2023).