Blas Castagna, Alfredo

Blas Castagna, Alfredo

1935

Born and raised in the Barracas district of Buenos Aires (which borders La Boca, the predominantly Italian port area: literally at 'the mouth' of the river) he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and the Escuela Nacional Prilidiano Pueyrredon. In his youth he took an interest in the works of Bosch and Breughel and he frequented the house of artist Eduardo MacEntyre. Blas Castagna's early works, produced in the 1960s and 1970s during Argentina's military dictatorship, were largely figurative and made use of the grotesque to comment on the violence present in the everyday life of the country. At the end of the 1970s his work shifted towards abstraction, following his contact with Chinese calligraphy and Roman art in Catalonia, Spain. At this time, he began to produce prints from engraving plates, adding wood and vegetable fibres in high relief in order to produce embossed monotypes. Blas Castagna is perhaps best known for his constructed objects and from the 1980s onwards he has continued on the path of abstraction, producing watercolours, collages and objects often made from found materials, including metal, fabric, cardboard and string. Then as now, Blas Castagna's work shows a strong constructivist tendency, with Joaquín Torres García, the Uruguayan founder of the School of the South, as a local precedent. His own family is originally from Sicily and, as a child, his parents told him myths and legends from this homeland. In 1959 Blas Castagna visited Sicily for the first time and began to make personal and formal, artistic connections between the Mediterranean Sea and the Argentine River Plate and the architecture of their respective ports. The artist later explored such resonances through themes of travel and the sea: ships, water and fish. His most recent works use the recurrent motif of a ship's tiller. Since his first solo exhibition in 1961, Blas Castagna has exhibited individually and in group shows both in Argentina and abroad. In 2004, he was invited to participate in the jury of Argentina's Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales.