Galería RGR is proud to announce the representation of César Paternosto (b. 1931, La Plata, Argentina), a painter, sculptor, and theorist whose work locates the origins of abstraction in the Americas rather than in Europe. The gallery will open Abstract Stone, the artist's first solo exhibition in Mexico since 1986, on September 3, 2026.
In 1969 Paternosto began painting on the lateral edges of his canvases, keeping the front a single unbroken color, most often white. He called it la visión oblicua, the oblique vision. The work cannot be taken in from the front alone: the viewer has to move around it, and the painting becomes an object. Lucy Lippard has written on his work since 1981, and in 2020 Hans Ulrich Obrist published a book-length interview with him, introduced by Lippard.
César was making this argument long before the field was ready to hear it. He looked at Andean stone and Andean weaving and found a way into abstraction that did not pass through Europe. That is the conversation this gallery has been having since it opened, and he belongs in it.
— Ricardo González Ramos, Founder and Director, Galería RGR
Beginning in 1977, Paternosto traveled repeatedly to Peru and Bolivia to study Inca stonework and Andean weaving. The research produced both a new body of work and an argument in print: that abstraction has a genealogy in the Americas independent of European modernism. He set it out in Piedra abstracta: la escultura inca, una visión contemporánea, published in 1989 by the Mexican publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica, and expanded it for the English-language edition, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art (University of Texas Press, 1996). The exhibition takes its title from the first of these two books.
Transforming the support of painting was a project of the Río de la Plata avant-garde that César Paternosto brought up to date and carried into an important debate with Minimalism. His recovery of the memory of an Andean abstraction that predates the West is another of the layers added to the body of work Paternosto has bequeathed to the History of painting, with a
capital H.
— Gabriela Rangel, Executive Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, and Artistic Director of Galería RGR, 2023–2025
Abstract Stone brings together thirteen works made between 1969 and 2021, most of them acrylic on canvas. The earliest, Tlön, is from 1969, the year Paternosto moved the marks to the edge of the canvas. The exhibition is weighted toward the painting that came out of the Andean research, including Tambo Colorado II (1991), and continues through Cuarteto(2006) and later work.
At Galería RGR, Paternosto joins artists with whom he crossed paths over the course of his career. In 1966 he took the first prize at the III Bienal Americana de Arte in Córdoba, Argentina, where Carlos Cruz-Diez won the grand prize from a jury chaired by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. In 1971, Jesús Rafael Soto acquired Paternosto's Discurrimiento (1970) for the collection he was then assembling in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, which opened two years later as the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto. In 1974, all three showed together in Madrid, at Galería Aele. His work will now be shown alongside theirs, in the gallery's exhibitions and at international art fairs.
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