César Paternosto

'Geometric abstraction' is a school of abstract art which refuses to adopt the conventions of optical effects and visual distance. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, it was the template which Cesar Paternosto adopted for his earlier works in the late 1950's. His initial approach was non-formal and rapidly evolved into a more representational and expressive style. He mentioned many years later, that it was a performance of Anton Webern's music he had attended around 1957, which shaped the course of his next artistic development. Paternosto was fascinated by the use of silence in Webern's music. In his attempt to emulate the Austrian composer's use of silence, in contrast to the use of sound in his compositions, Paternosto decided to remove the centre of focus in his paintings from the representational to the peripheral. While the centre of the canvas was often left unadorned and barren, he accentuated the importance of the periphery of the frame of the painting instead. By enlarging the scope of the figural domain in his works, he craftily redefined the customary understanding of the painting as an exclusively frontal object, thus making it multidimensional. Paternosto carefully summarised the evolution of his theoretical investigations in his 2012 essay, “Painting as Object: Geometric Forms and Lateral Expansions.” Born in Argentinas in 1931, he started to travel extensively around South America in the late 1970's to investigate how native cultures had incorporated form and colour in traditional crafts and sculptures. He has been living in Spain since 2005 and remains at the centre of the world of geometric abstraction, both as a curator and artist.