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18/12/2007

Equipo 57

Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Sevilla

Half a century has passed since the creation in May 1957 in Paris, of the Equipo 57 collective of young, committed Spanish artists who had travelled to the French capital attracted by its cultural dynamism, anxious to discover the artistic avant-gardes and to find ways in which to channel their aesthetic concerns, so enormously different to the localist Spanish tradition fomented by the Franco regime in the post-war years.
Ángel Duarte (Aldeanueva del Camino, Cáceres, 1930 - Sion, Switzerland, 2007), Agustín Ibarrola (Bilbao 1930) and from Córdoba Juan Serrano (1929) and José Duarte (1928) met in 1957 in Paris, where they were soon to work along the same conceptual lines, partly because of the influence exercised by the sculptor Jorge de Oteiza, from whom they were to become estranged that same year as a result of the publication of the group's first radical manifesto. In it they denounced mercantilism in art and the stagnation of plastic forms and proposed a collective approach without personalisms or individual authorship. The group was joined a little later by Juan Cuenca, also from Córdoba (Puente Genil, 1934), who remained until its dissolution in 1962.
Meanwhile, on the international art scene the last episodes of the struggle between New York and Paris were being fought out for cultural hegemony after the Second World War. A strong new identity was becoming consolidated on the other side of the Atlantic, heir to European modernity, but increasingly independent in its artistic and cultural manifestations and identifying with action painting as its own culture. At the same time, in Europe, informalism was developing as various expressive tendencies revealing the anguish and despair of the post-war years. Both attitudes showed neither prior structure nor control of the emotions when confronting the picture surface.
However, in the 1950's other circles in Europe and South America were speculating with artistic criteria of another dimension, centred on notions such as mobility, change or synthesis, seeking, in the words of Miklos Pasternak "a recontextualisation of the categories of space, light, movement and temporality, in sum, the attempt to set the starting point for a new origin" (1). This attitude led to the formation of such research groups as Arte Concreta in Milan, Espace in Paris, Exat in Zagreb, Gutai in Japan, Equipo 57 in Spain, Gruppe Zero in Germany, etc. The investigations carried out by these collectives can be considered as attempts to break with the type of dramatic narration typical of the individualist expressionisms.
So Equipo 57 was to move along these paths, attempting to reconcile plastic investigation with scientific reflection, for which they adopted a work practice based on prior discussion and research before the collective execution of the art works.
The need to expand plastic space led them to formulate the Theory of Interactivity, in which they stated that form, colour, line and mass do not exist as independent elements, but that everything is space, differentiated by its dynamic function. Form-Space is reduced to space-colour in painting and to space-mass and space-air in sculpture, each one the result of an interdependence.
This theory can be seen in operation in the abstract film Interactividad I, shown in the exhibition and made in 1957 using over 400 collectively painted watercolours (some of which are also on show) arranged as frames to produce the sensation of movement.
Equipo 57 created different paintings and sculptures. In their evolution, the former began with a preponderance of straight and curved lines separating the different colour planes, which gradually became arranged according to a more serial concept. The first sculptures, on the other hand, were pieces with mass and volume of organic appearance that could connect with the work of Hans Arp, until research centred on the interrelations between planes and surfaces using materials such as galvanized wire rods or plaster. Although references to the constructivists Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner are inevitable when using paraboloids, Equipo 57 moved away from them by overcoming the Russians sculptors' plane limitations and discovering that by juxtaposing two or more hyperbolic paraboloids they produced a spatial continuity of double curvature that gave their pieces greater dynamism.
The practical application of their theories led Equipo 57 to design prototypes of functional furniture that could easily be set up and dismantled using assemblages of parts. They were awarded prizes and exhibited just as any work of art together with the team's pieces of painting and sculpture in different galleries in Madrid and Córdoba.
During its short life, Equipo 57's activity was intense, as was its international projection.
Apart from their reflections, investigations and works, created and shown at prestigious galleries in Paris, Copenhagen, Zurich, Brussels and Spanish cities such as Madrid, Córdoba, Barcelona and Valencia, their work as agitators by Equipo 57 was equally important for the formation of other artistic groups sharing their spirit of social and political commitment. Likewise, they brought about social transformations such as the radical change in methods of teaching the arts.
Through their lectures, encounters, debates and publications, which are fortunately stored in the archives, we can understand the coherence of their essential ideas, on which they based their experimental attitude and their peculiar sense of historical dialectics.

Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo
Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de las Cuevas
Avda. Américo Vespucio n 2
Isla de la Cartuja - 41092 Sevilla
Tuesday to Friday: 10 - 20 h.
Saturday: 11 - 20 h.
Sundays: 10 - 15 h.
Monday: closed.

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