Painting Beyond the Center/Periphery Axis:
A Critical Approach to the Project Argentina pinta bien

Laura Demaría
University of Maryland 

The visual arts project Argentina pinta bien (2003-20120 has been a collective effort to showcase contemporary visual artists from the different Argentine provinces in Buenos Aires. This collective “program”—as it has been named—has been sponsored by the different art museums from each one of the provinces, the Centro Cultural Recoleta and the City of Buenos Aires. Their goal was to introduce contemporary visual artists working in the provinces into that cultural center which is supposed to be Buenos Aires, and more specifically the Centro Cultural Recoleta. A sense of distinction and accomplishment permeates the curators’ narratives that accompany the catalogues, where it is explained the scouting expeditions through the provinces. Each one of the catalogues—which replicates the different exhibits at the Centro—includes a series of essays that delineates the project as a whole and the intentions of the curators/sponsors. In these essay, one could trace the presence of a narrative that fixes the provinces as periphery while portrays Buenos Aires as the cultural center of the country.

In my paper I will contest this narrative inscribed in the project by using—in the sense de Certeau gives to this term—the same visual materials the catalogues included. My goal is to critically read the tensions one can see between the curators’ narratives and the paintings they chose to present as specific of the cultural contexts of the provinces. The paintings included in the exhibitions/catalogues, in my opinion, could be used as a starting point to create another narrative that would break away with the reductionist perspective that sees the provinces as the locus of a regionalist identity. In short, my paper will read the catalogues against the grain paying closer attention to what the paintings show beyond the curators’ intentions.