D O C U M E N T I N T R O D U C T I O N

IntrOductIOn tO tOMÁs MaLdOnadO’s
“the abstract and the cOncrete In
MOdern art” and aLfredO hLItO’s
“nOtes tOward a MaterIaLIst
aesthetIcs”

mEgan a. sullivan

The two texts presented here in translation are key documents in the
history of the Argentine avant-garde. Originally published in August
1946 in the fi rst issue of Arte Concreto-Invención, they are arguably the
most representative pieces of writing of the eponymous association,
along with the collectively authored “Inventionist Manifesto.” During its
short lifetime (1945–47), the Association of Concrete Art-Invention
(Asociación Arte Concreto-
Invención, or AACI) promoted
a radically materialist under-
standing of painting that aimed
to reveal the concrete founda-
tions of abstraction.

This approach was novel
in many important respects.
For one, it entailed an overtly
formal and rationalistic take on
the notion of “invention,"
which until that point had
served as an umbrella for a

Cover of Arte Concreto-Invención, 1946. Image

courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00342

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loosely confederated group of Rioplatense artists.1 Taken at its most
general, this notion proclaimed that art ought to create new realities; para
the AACI, sin embargo, it demanded the expulsion of all vestiges of illusion
from painting.2 But just as these artists diverged from other
“Inventionist” groups in Argentina and Uruguay, they likewise devel-
oped a program for concrete art that had little to do with contemporary
European theories of Concretism. If in the 1930s Theo van Doesburg
and Max Bill advanced definitions that focused on concretizing ideas via
painting, the AACI instead characterized Concretism as the pursuit of
the very materiality of painting. Sin embargo, the group was not seeking
to offer an Argentine, Latin American, or non-Western alternative to
European practices of modernist painting: in a decidedly universalistic
vein, the AACI artists considered their project to be the culmination of
the historical avant-garde, as is attested to by their landmark strategy,
the so-called coplanar.

The coplanar is a structure composed of a variable number of irreg-
ularly shaped boards, each one monochrome, that maintain a relation of
coplanarity: attached to the wall and aligned with one other by means of
wire or sticks, these polygons coexist on the same geometric plane. Es
by virtue of this coplanarity that the resulting structure, although evi-
dently three-dimensional, retains the two-dimensional logic of the pic-
ture plane. No longer contained by the frame or any preexisting support,
the individual form-objects come to interact directly with and within
architectural space. Yet this relation is by no means analogous to the
one that takes place between a sculpture and real space: even though
the forms of painting have materialized three-dimensionally, the copla-
nar continues to function as a painting. Rather than fully embracing

On the history of these groups and their rivalries, the most exhaustive source is Gabriel
Pérez-Barreiro, “The Argentine Avant-Garde: 1944–1950” (PhD diss., University of Essex,
1996). For more synoptic accounts that posit these artists as precursors of a distinct lineage
of South American concretism, see Mónica Amor, Theories of the Non-Object: Argentina,
Brasil, Venezuela, 1944–1969 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); y alejandro
Alberro, Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin
America (chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
For the manifold iterations of the concept of invention in South America, see Alexander
Alberro, “To Find, to Create, to Reveal: Torres-García and the Models of Invention in
Mid-1940s Río de la Plata,” in Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, ed. Luis
Pérez-Oramas (Nueva York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015), exhibition catalog, 106–21;
and Alejandro Crispiani, Objetos para transformar el mundo: trayectorias del arte concreto-
invención, Argentina y Chile, 1940–1970 (Bernal, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de
Quilmes, 2011), 41–82.

128

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artmargins 12:1

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129

Tomás Maldonado. “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno,” with a “coplanar” piece by Juan Alberto

Molenberg pictured. Arte Concreto-Invención, 1946. Image courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.

three-dimensionality, this strategy activates a dialectic in which the
space of painting is effectively transposed into real space, while real
space is simultaneously absorbed into the plane of painting.

Both the rationale and the historical significance of the coplanar are

extensively discussed in Tomás Maldonado’s “The Abstract and the
Concrete in Modern Art” (1946). The text starts with the general propo-
sition that painting, in all epochs, has sought to provide a “graphic defi-

nition” of the human experience of space and time. In the past,
Maldonado argues, that definition had been pursued by representational
medio; de este modo, painting was committed to producing renditions of a three-
dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface—a foundational con-
tradiction that had trapped it within the realm of falsehood and illusion.
During the first decades of the 20th century, sin embargo, modern art,
increasingly aware of that contradiction, launched a critique of represen-
tation that began with Cubism and acquired more definite contours with
Russian Constructivism, Neoplasticism, and Concretism. Este último
endeavors sought to clarify the most pressing question that modern art
faced: how to achieve a form of painting that could simultaneously
address the dual problems of spatial integration and composition.

In Maldonado’s view, that was exactly what the coplanar accom-
plished. Para él, Malevich’s “discovery” of the plane via the mono-
chrome had not solved the two-dimensional problem of figure-ground
relaciones: the exaltation of the plane, in and of itself, could not mark the
end of representation, because it failed to address the question of the
relations between the forms of painting. The fundamental mistake made
by the Russian Constructivists, and by others who followed, was to
assume that through simply asserting the surface of the canvas, they no
longer needed to address the question of structure. A diferencia de,
Maldonado argues, the AACI artists had developed a strategy that
addressed both the question of the plane and the problem of composi-
ción. Building upon the monochrome, the coplanar did indeed release
the forms of painting into space, but those forms—now three-dimen-
sional objects—were still rigorously structured. Además, thanks both to
the dynamism of its constitutive forms and to its strict adherence to the
logic of the plane, the coplanar was capable of structuring space itself. En
otras palabras, it did not merely occupy space, but rather shaped it.3

What Maldonado offers in this text, entonces, is both a genealogy of the
AACI and a succinct account of what he understands to be the history of
modernism—one that happens to find its culmination in the coplanar.
This fact might in principle suggest that Maldonado’s reconstruction is a
biased one, yet he would have vigorously objected to that claim. El
proper analysis of the history of art, he believed, required the interpreter

For a more extended discussion of Maldonado’s ideas about the possibilities of the plane,
see Megan A. sullivan, Radical Form: Modernist Abstraction in South America (nuevo refugio,
CT: Prensa de la Universidad de Yale, 2022), cap. 2.

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to address the problems faced by individual artists and movements as
symptoms of a fundamental contradiction that could only be identified as
such with hindsight. He would therefore have contended that the point of
his article was not to project the AACI’s concerns onto previous modern-
ist endeavors, but to advance a historical explanation founded on both
empirical analysis and dialectical reasoning. But just as a dialectical
notion of historical causality plays an important part in this argument, entonces
too does a conception of art as a problem-solving activity. For Maldonado,
artistic progress was not simply about adding new strategies or tech-
niques—formal development was necessarily driven by the desire to pro-
duce better solutions to problems whose historical significance
oftentimes escaped the judgment of individual artists.

In this context, Alfredo Hlito’s “Notes toward a Materialist
Aesthetics” emerges as an important theoretical supplement to
Maldonado’s historical-formal reconstruction. An exercise in synthetic
writing, the text is composed of eleven theses—an obvious nod to
Marx’s well-known “Eleven Theses on Feuerbach”—and punctuated by
several digressions that make for particularly difficult reading. Hlito’s
sketch of a materialist aesthetics, notably, is not founded on Marx’s
materialist conception of history, but rather on the Marxist theory of
knowledge expounded in treatises such as Engels’s Anti-Düring and
Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The view of Marxism that is
at play here is one in which Marxist politics, ethics, and aesthetics are
all grounded in dialectical materialism, which is in turn conceived of as
a materialist alternative to Hegel’s idealist dialectics. Hlito’s aesthetics
therefore grants primacy to Marxist epistemology and method. Para todos
his repeated allusions to history and social practice, he does not address
art as a social or historical phenomenon: categories such as base and
superstructure, economic interest, or even class struggle are wholly
absent from his account. Like Maldonado, Hlito is adamant that art
functions and evolves according to its own logic. He defends an evolu-
tionary approach to art history in which artistic practice, at every stage
of its development, is burdened with contradictions, the partial resolu-
tions of which eventually demonstrate the obsolescence of earlier forms.
But parallel to this runs his belief that if art is to move forward, es
imperative to debunk the old frameworks that have provided its theoret-
ical foundation, like idealism in the case of representational art.

Although Hlito’s argument against idealism is not clearly stated, él
can be understood to take issue with the allegedly Kantian notion that

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the physical world only provides the senses with stimuli that the intel-
lect organizes according to its own logic. For Hlito, this view is unten-
capaz: it asks us to accept that the object of the subject’s cognition is the
subject itself, which ultimately means that the aesthetic object is irrele-
vant to aesthetic experience. Por el contrario, he claims, a materialist aes-
thetics asserts that reality possesses a rational structure in and of
itself—a structure that exists independently from the mind. Hlito thus
rejects the notion that it is the subject that “shapes” empirical reality by
projecting onto it the formal categories of the intellect. Al mismo
tiempo, sin embargo, he argues that the second mistake of idealist aesthetics is
to ignore that the art object results from a process through which the
artist (es decir., the subject) endows a natural object (es decir., a raw material) con
aesthetic properties.

These two propositions might seem antithetical, as Hlito appears

to be simultaneously arguing that the subject both shapes and does not
shape reality. In view of this, it is essential to note that Hlito is not deny-
ing that the subject can effectively transform the physical world through
their actions (eso es, en efecto, the point that he wants to make); what he
is rejecting is the idealist notion that the objects of cognition lack objec-
tive reality. While he maintains that the aesthetic object is qualitatively
different from the natural object, its newly added properties are
undoubtedly objective, in that they can be verified by the senses. Ahora,
the basic trouble with idealism lies in the notion that the aesthetic
object ultimately exists as a function of the subject’s consciousness. Para
a materialist aesthetic, on the contrary, “the object is exhausted in its
properties.” This means that the art object, in spite of bearing properties
that are not “natural,” is still objective inasmuch as those properties can
be empirically verified.

This emphasis on the empirical verifiability of aesthetic properties
speaks to what can be called a “naturalized” aesthetics: one in which the
mind is not granted a privileged status in relation to the physical world.
If taken as a paradigm of artistic practice, this aesthetics calls for an art-
work that attests to the process that brought it into material existence. Él
can be argued, in this sense, that although Hlito’s theses do not discuss
the coplanar in an explicit manner, they nevertheless furnish it with a
theoretical justification that goes beyond mere objecthood. Seen under
the light of Hlito’s remarks, the coplanar not only asserts its own mate-
riality but also emerges as an aesthetic object that results from a process
that undoes the fiction of objectivity on which representational painting

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rests: its newly added aesthetic properties directly challenge whatever
may count as “aesthetic” from an idealist perspective, since they do not
point in the direction of the subject’s consciousness. Además, insofar
as it stresses both the materiality and the processuality of the art object,
the coplanar ultimately seems to illustrate, as Alejandro Crispiani has
remarked, the core principles of dialectical materialism as understood
by the AACI artists.4

There are several important points of intersection between
Maldonado’s and Hlito’s texts. Despite their obvious thematic differ-
ences, they both expound the fundamentals of a concrete art that
revolves around the materiality of the artwork. They both stand against
expressionism, understood either as the rejection of structure in paint-
ing or, more broadly, as the notion that aesthetic phenomena are those
that fulfill the expressive needs of the subject. Both writers are also for-
malists, in that they ascribe to art a domain of its own, either as an
object of historical interpretation or as a social practice.

What they offer, sin embargo, is not simply a work of art that insists on
the materiality of the picture plane, but one that is also understood to be
absolutely self-referential in the sense of bearing witness to the process
that led to its existence. That process is how both Maldonado and Hlito
interpreted “invention.” For them, this category was not intended to
assert the powers of creation over a formless reality; to invent was to
reveal the epistemological foundations of reality—that is, to enlighten
our understanding of reality by dispelling the superstitions and mystifi-
cations that pre- or nonscientific aesthetics had projected onto it. Es
this highly intellectualized definition of process that sets the AACI’s
project apart from other modernist approaches to the materiality of the

Crispiani, Objetos, 121. The radicality of this materialist approach to art might in principle
suggest that the Argentine Communist Party (PCA), of which both Maldonado and Hlito
were members, saw the AACI’s endeavors sympathetically. That was not the case: the PCA
demanded social realism. For the party, the social function of art amounted to little more
than propaganda. Both Maldonado and Hlito were contributors to Orientación—the official
organ of the PCA—yet it was their theoretical acumen, rather than their art, that the party
valued most. As conflicts accrued, the bulk of the AACI artists would be expelled from the
PCA in 1948. On the AACI’s uneasy relation with the Communist Party, see Ana Longoni
and Daniela Lucena, “De cómo el ‘júbilo creador’ se trastocó en ‘desfachatez’: El pasaje de
Maldonado y los concretos por el Partido Comunista, 1945–1948,” in Tomás Maldonado:
un moderno en acción, ed. Mario Gradowczyk (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional Tres
de Febrero, 2008), 56–70; Daniela Lucena, Contaminación artística: vanguardia concreta,
comunismo y peronismo en los años 40 (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2015), 101–26; and Adriana
Petra, Intelectuales y cultura comunista: itinerarios, problemas y debates en la Argentina de pos-
guerra (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2017), 76–86, 111–31.

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artwork. The centrality that Russian Constructivism accorded to tech-
niques and materials, Por ejemplo, is largely missing in the AACI’s
coplanar. And even though the group’s concerted erasure of brush-
strokes might suggest an interest in asserting the superiority of
machine production over the hand of the artist—as was the case with
Van Doesburg—here, neither the mark of the tool nor the mark of the
hand was of importance to these artists. What interested the AACI was
not the indexes of making but those of a rational process leading to
what Hlito calls an object “exhausted in its properties” (tesis 9).

Not long after the publication of these texts, both Maldonado and

Hlito would abandon the coplanar. As early as 1948, Maldonado
observed that “the opposition between figure and ground remained in
lugar, but from being illusory it became concrete. . . . The dissolution of
the ground led to an exaggerated sculptural exaltation of the figure.
Una vez más, Renaissance ‘form’—the anecdote—took over.”5 Not only
did Maldonado come to believe that the coplanar repeated the same
mistake for which he had earlier indicted the Constructivists, él también
came to the conclusion that spatial experiments in general offered a
false solution to the question of representation. In the years that fol-
lowed the dissolution of the AACI, both Maldonado and Hlito would
pursue the notion of invention through other avenues, most notably
those offered by Max Bill’s version of Concretism: rather than seeking to
dismantle the medium, they would aspire to work through it by retain-
ing the contradiction of figure and ground.

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134

Tomás Maldonado, El arte concreto y el problema de lo ilimitado: Notas para un estudio teórico.
Zurich 1948 (Buenos Aires: ramona, 2003), 11–12. My translation.

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