La edad de la razón [The Age of Reason]

During the 1960s, Ernesto Deira often titled his works after his literary, philosophical, and political concerns. This painting shares its title with the first volume of Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy The Roads to Freedom, a masterpiece of existentialist writing. The influence of Sartre’s Marxist-inspired existentialism in Argentina was profound. Here Deira meditates on human existence through visual means. His figures are built through layered splashes, thick brushstrokes, and dripping colors that do little to solidify their substance. These presences remain open, conflicted and undefined, as they oscillate between the spectral and the grotesque.