Espectro IV [Spectrum IV]

In the mid-1940s, Hlito co-founded the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención [Association of Concrete-Invention Art] in Buenos Aires. The Asociación promoted an extreme, Marxist-based, “hard-edge” type of abstract art, so it is perhaps surprising to find this sensual and subtle painting by the same artist. However, Hlito had become disillusioned with strict geometrical abstraction when he first traveled to Europe and saw that Piet Mondrian’s paintings, viewed close up, were actually full of expressive and hesitant brushwork. From this moment on, he abandoned the harsh lines and impersonal geometry of his previous works, and began to concentrate on the individual brush stroke and the visible trace of the human hand. Espectro IV is an extreme example of that experimentation. Hlito created a hazy, dreamlike effect by juxtaposing individual brushstrokes that at a distance appear to shimmer. But the painting is still completely abstract, with not even a suggestion of forms. The oval shape around the edge of the canvas could be a reference back to the early abstract works of modernist pioneers Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Mondrian, who often used this oval frame within a rectangle—a sign perhaps of Hlito’s attempt to recover and reexamine the origins of abstract painting.