Transformation: becoming aware. Alicia Chillida

"At the present time, the artist can play a more important role than his own work by placing himself between the social force that nourishes him and the social force that can be derived from the creative imagination. The artist will take as a starting point a true ethical intention and progress [sic] becoming an integrator of multiple experiences, in opposition to the continuous fragmentation to which our society submits us, to contribute to the conception of a more complete man".

"Art is an exact state of man".
(Victor Grippo)

Victor Grippo's work takes place in the politically charged climate of Buenos Aires in the 1970s, a time of excitement and intellectual ferment in which culture emerges in the streets. In that environment of popular search for knowledge, the possibility of creating a new way of thinking, of resignifying objects, to which Grippo, a chemist by training, resorts, is an open path in the territory of art: "In 1970 I began to work with potatoes as a material, trying (sic) to 'sacralize' an apparently unimportant everyday object and discover its multiple meanings. Art and science -logic and analogical- served as instruments".

In 1970 Grippo presented his work Analogy I in the exhibition Arte de sistemas at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. In it, he proposes to expand the everyday function of a familiar object, the potato, by measuring the energy it produces through a wooden grid with 40 potatoes arranged in cells, each with two electrodes, one of zinc and the other of copper. Using a voltmeter, the viewer can measure the electrical energy they generate (0.7 volts per unit). In an accompanying text, the author draws an analogy between three states of the potato and three states of human consciousness. For the potato, the states are: 1) dictionary definition, 2) daily use of the potato as food, 3) unconventional use: obtaining energy. And for consciousness, the same: 1) definition, 2) daily use: individual consciousness, 3) non-daily use: energy awareness.

Art uncovers hidden or concealed relationships. If one of my works "rediscovers" the energetic capacity of the potato, that common food, which is eaten almost without seeing it because there is no "day without potato" in any inhabitant of the planet, it is because I try to provide a totalizing image that destroys or weakens that kind of blindness that has made it almost invisible to most people. Simply, it is used, it is eaten. We forget what it is, all that it implies. Everything responds to a worldview, to that inner state, to that way of life.

The choice of a humble food such as the potato, which becomes by analogy the image of mental energy, is not gratuitous. With it Grippo vindicates the value of his country and the construction of his own culture, while making a sacralization, not only of the potato itself, but also of the poor, of the everyday, basic object. We must not lose sight of the fact that the potato, originally from Peru, arrived in Europe in the mid-sixteenth century, where it is called a "revolutionary plant" because it immediately displaced native crops and modified their diet.

The value given by the artist to the potato in its relation to human consciousness, its nature as a true symbol of cognitive capacity, connects it intimately with the stone of the philosophers, in Síntesis (1972) he highlights the analogy between potato and stone. The stone as the starting point of all wisdom in the alchemical tradition, a true allegory of images that synthesize the objective of man as a thinking and creative being.

In this way, Grippo's work takes a journey from the major arts to the basis of society. His gaze is vertical, it is directed by analogy from vegetable energy to the energy of human creativity, from the visible to the invisible. It is an invitation to a communication with the secret interiority of some everyday objects. Already in Untitled (1966) provides a glimpse of this system of its own, composed of circuits, connections and linking paths, in which the transposition of poetic, scientific and metaphysical operations to the art system generates a syntax of diverse symbolic elements.

"I began to incorporate into my paintings (they were still paintings) images from the world of mechanisms, which is also the world of modern work. Later, the images took dimension, movement and lights of their own. Then, the mechanism was the plastic work. You can paint machines, make images of machines (Leonardo's drawings, Léger). But I went from painting them (as one of the steps of an evolution) to incorporating them into a system of symbolization, into a language.".

Grippo believes in work as a constitutive force of the human being, which becomes the key to achieve the main objective: the transformation of man through the exercise of a trade. The five foundational trades of society are associated in the work Some trades (1976): the blacksmith, the carpenter, the stonemason, the tiller and the bricklayer. For Guy Brett, beyond a simple hymn to work, the artist "tries to dissolve the traditional scales of value between art and craft in an image of reciprocity".

When man created his first tool, he simultaneously created the first useful object and the first work of art (...) Modification of matter and modification of the spirit, in an interaction between thought and the prolonged hand. There are perfect moments in man's work where it is impossible to define whether it is he who guides the tool or the tool that moves his hand.

The paradigmatic work of this particular relationship with labor is the Construction of a popular bread baking oven(The wrapping of the catalog of the exhibition contained two texts signed by Joseph Beuys, the pronouncements of the Organization for Direct Democracy - Free Popular Initiative). Grippo, main author of the work, together with Gamarra and the artisan Rossi, explains his position:

"Intention: to transfer an object known in a certain environment and by certain people, to another environment used by other people. Object: to revalue an element of daily use, which implies, in addition to the sculptural constructive aspect, an attitude. Action: a) construction of the Oven; b) making the Bread; c) breaking the Bread. Pedagogical result: to describe the process of construction of the Oven and the making of the Bread (...) The participation of the public will be possible through an exchange of information". (…)

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, MUAC, Mexico, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, 2014).