The National Museum of Fine Arts exhibits in the enormous pavilion of the ground floor a great sample of paintings, plus some drawings, papers and sculptures made during the last year and part of the 2000 by Eduardo Hoffmann. The exhibition, which impacts on the variety, freedom and quantity of work, bears the paradoxical title of Emptiness. The notion of emptiness in Hoffmann takes its meaning from a certain mystical tradition which, to express certain phenomena and religious experiences, makes simultaneous use of both the “affirmative” (satiety, full and complete) and “negative” (empty): phenomena of polar identity that include the opposites, just as in the works exhibited in the Museum. Thus an order of experience is expressed in terms of its opposite. This paradoxical and dichotomous functioning of meaning is at the origin of the myths and the story that religions make of their respective cosmogonies.
In Buddhism - the religion that most appeals to Hoffmann. the functioning of the dual spiritual state takes the names of Samsara and Nirvana as constructive principles. In relation to the experiences of introspection and isolation, Hoffmann decided to settle eight years ago, far from the mundane noise, in the small town of Parquemar, near Miramar and five hundred kilometers from Buenos Aires. The great living room of the artist’s house-born in Mendoza in 1957, grandson of an amateur painter and a collector who has many works by Fernando Fader. follows the pattern of certain nineteenth century painters, because the interior walls are completely covered by an immense fresco painted by himself. Nature and art, for this painter, drawer, sculptor and videographer, constitute the most appropriate context for artistic practice. The huge house and the workshop are surrounded by dogs and fruit trees: plum, walnut, apple, fig tree are part of that context - there are forests and fields planted there. - which has a concrete impact on the performance of his work. This relative isolation, however, does not violate the information that every contemporary artist should have: Hoffmann takes it and receives it permanently through different channels, more usual now than when he barely moved. But for some time now he is an artist of the world: he showed his work in most of the great international art fairs. And in these days of a marathon February for the artist, also presents an exhibition in Panama.
This shows that the long periods in which the artist does not show in Argentina remain, as now, long compensated with sufficiently generous exhibitions, such as the one that can be seen in the National Museum of Fine Arts. Before the dozens and dozens of paintings that are shown in the Museum it is difficult for the viewer to escape from touching what is seen. Touching is a check. Touching those paintings, it is assumed, is getting closer to the truth they show. In this case, to see if all those colors and shades correspond to an imagined texture. It is the closeness of touch that seeks intimacy and contact. But those complex surfaces are only crossed with the look. The hand reaches nothing more than there.
“I am a painter who tends to load his works in several senses and, of course, with a lot of material,” says Hoffmann. “This idea of ​​emptiness, which I take from Buddhism, has attracted me for a long time: it allows me to free myself or, rather, to leave the pictures freed to my own gesture. And as for the vacuum, I am very interested in the blank spaces of the fabric. The gaps that each work includes, that which is within the world of the painter but nevertheless was not touched by him. I believe, in short, that nothing exists except emptiness and beauty. Besides all this intense work left me, for a time, empty. “Hoffmann began his career as a virtuoso and has an academic background that respects but against which at the same time he struggles. That is why, little by little, he was exorcising virtuosity, taking away all the acrobatic burrs, until transforming it into adventure. He lived in Salvador de Bahia and in Paris. He has an excellent large-format artist’s book (published in 1991) and two good catalogs at the Der Brücke gallery in 1993 and 1996. He won the prizes, among others, Movado (1988) and Fortabat (1991) ). His last exhibition in Buenos Aires before this one at the MNBA was an excellent retrospective four years ago at the Borges Center: paintings that continued outside the painting to become sculptures; cracked sectors of the floor that he appropriated as if they were drawings. He had mastered virtuosity to privilege painting. Hoffmann’s ability to draw attention is that he is always composing and recomposing drawings: he imaginatively isolates a segment of the world called “real” -the branch of a tree, a seed, an insect, the whites of the page of a book, etc.-. and transforms it into a work of its own with a few strokes if it is a plane or with some added detail, if it is an object. Between the void and its plot setback, I fill it, more than a jump there is a continuity, a series of variations and changes that lead from one to another. “I like to think that each work is independent of others and, in the first place, of myself. Of course, there are certain pictures that are related to others, which are familiar to each other and get along, but I do not like the twins. I prefer variations, “continues Hoffmann. But in truth, the Hoffmann method is that of a simultaneity of styles that cross freely. The changeable nature of his work-from one technique to another. it’s noticeable in the successive series of related tables.
When the eye stops in a series that can be a carrier of a supposed “Hoffmann style”, then the artist mutates, looks for a new direction, he escapes from his own work. It is clear that style is the way in which an artist works with the truth and expectation of the other, and so his production modifies, in each new exhibition, what is expected of him. The surfaces of his paintings are crossed by layers of materials, colors, infinite lines, grids, prints, insects, accidents. Each work is a burning territory that functions as a place where materials are deposited and mixed. Each painting could be thought of as a collection of aesthetic traditions: the strokes and marks suppose at the same time a gestural tradition and a primitivism that the artist cultivates religiously. Through the thickness (material and symbolic) of each painting is inferred a process not only technical but fundamentally cultural. Layers of successive and superimposed materials evoke distinct layers of lost senses. Meanwhile, on the surface, drawings are displayed: all a recognizable zoology and botany, plus a series of arabesques that sometimes play symmetry and others go crazy in crazy sequences. The nature of the works produces the certainty of the surplus. This notorious sense of excess is also seen in the assembly and selection of the sample. Contrary to the current tendency, according to which it is rigorous to show only a dozen works per exhibition, Hoffmann does not dose and shows everything: the beginning, the process, the transition, the change, the step back, the end, the resumption and so on. The works establish a dialogue between them and the artist does not want to interrupt that plot. “I think the works,” the painter finishes, “always exceed me. Also, I like the idea of ​​not recognizing myself in the play. Or, in any case, to feel in them only an air of familiarity.”