Biography
Son of Italian parents, Juan Doffo began his artistic activity when he was 11 years old in a self-taught way, by drawing cartoons in his small hometown, Mechita, across the Pampas plains of the province of Buenos Aires. At that age he began to study by correspondence courses that came from the Panamerican School of Art in Buenos Aires. Through it he had contact with great masters of the comic, as Alberto Breccia, Hugo Pratt, Oesterheld and others. At the same time he began to break into the world of illustration by knowing the works of José Luis Salinas, Arturo del Castillo, etc. His initial source of knowledge of the universal art was the legendary “Collection of the geniuses” and he asked people traveling to the city of Buenos Aires to buy it. The landscape of his town and the vast stage of the pampa were the inspiration for his early paintings. Moved to Buenos Aires in 1971, while studying at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón Fine Arts National School, he begins to deepen the concepts about pictorial space that will be crucial in his later work. He studies comparative religions and philosophy. He feels close to the work of Julius Bissier, Paul Klee and Xul Xolar. He felt that the human change must be both internal and social, that’s why he gets so close to the thoughts of Paulo Freire and explores the social reality of Latin American countries, as much as the mystic words of Krishnamurti, Gurdieff, Zen and Taoism. Undoubtedly, the questions about men and their place in the cosmos will be constant in his art. As soon as he arrives to Buenos Aires, he buys his first camera to register the landscape of his town, where he draws and paints on weekends, and the rest of the week he does it in Buenos Aires. His work is centralized in the landscape of his native region.
In 1979, he made his first individual exhibition at the legendary Witcomb Gallery. He obtained several awards and in 1980 he was given the Banco del Acuerdo Award Scholarship in a contest organized by the Fine Arts National Museum (MNBA), which allows him to live the whole 1981 in Europe and USA. There he had access to the knowledge of the classic and contemporary great masters. He rediscovered Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. He traveled through almost all the countries of Western Europe and divides his time between Amsterdam and Paris. He works very much in Italy, in the land of his father, and in the old medieval villages. The memory of time inscribes in the works of Doffo and incorporates fragments of maps of experienced geographies. The artist is inserted into a dialogue of integration between a postconceptual art and the rescue and joy of the pictorial work. After a month in New York he returned to Argentina in 1982. That year he exhibited in Jacques Martinez Gallery and in 1984 in "El Retiro" Gallery of Julia Lublin, the two most important galleries of contemporary art at that time in Buenos Aires.
That same year, the Argentine established in France art historian Damián Bayón, gets to know the work by Doffo and says out loud that he is the most important young artist he discovered in Argentina in recent years. The development of his work is related with the problems of the eighties, when the breakdown of the avant-garde occurs and when there was a return to painting but without losing the legacy of conceptual art. His work, where different ideas about life, death, questions of the man before the universe are constant in his visual researches, was identified as belonging to the Generation of the eighties, but nevertheless difficult to label in relation with the model of contemporary American and European art. Also the work by Juan Doffo was highlighted on several occasions as a contemporary and innovative look within the Argentinian tradition of the pampas landscape. In 1986, he was invited to make his first anthology exhibition (Juan Doffo: Summary 1974/1986 [Juan Doffo: resumen 1974/1986]) in the San Telmo Foundation, headed by the collector Jorge Helft. His work integrates regional and universal aspects of art. He has always worked between Buenos Aires and his hometown, where he merges a precise geographical look with situations of philosophy, psychology, politics, sexuality, and so on. Reflections on aspects of the new science of Topology begin to appear in some structures of his works. He feels very close to the artists of the Land Art, of the spirituality in the films by Andrei Tarkovsky, the video installations by Bill Viola, Anish Kapoor’s sculpture and Cornelia Parker, among other artists.
In 1998 he makes at the Palais de Glace an anthology exhibition called Second Summary 1987/1997 [Segundo Resumen 1987/1997], which spanned ten years of work. For the first time the artist showed a retrospective of large-format photographs, together with the last ten years of painting and installations. Photography began as a purely documentary tool for his paintings just after he arrived in Buenos Aires, but slowly gained independence as an expressive tool in his work. In 2003, in the Recoleta Cultural Center, he presented a major exhibition of photo-performances done during several years with the people of his village, where the symbolism of fire was the leitmotiv of his great photographs. In this exhibition, the artist managed to build a bridge between his personal imagery with the community's collective sense of the people. In 2007 he presented an exhibition of large format paintings in the Rubbers Gallery and in 2008 he was awarded with the First Prize in the National Salon of Painting and the Grand Award of María Calderón de la Barca Foundation.
Vision of art
2. In general terms, how would you suggest to approach your work?
I choose “Architecture of the infinite” [“Arquitectura del infinito˝] (2001), photography, direct take, analogue color copy, 120 x 150 cm.
I select this work, which I made in photographic format, because it is one of those works that sums up my love for cinema as well as for the visual arts. Photography was carried out within the geography of my native land in the Pampa's plains of Buenos Aires, intervening the landscape with the assistance and participation of local people, in addition to the symbolism of that strange substance that is fire. This built reality, which is very close to film productions, transforms that pampean space into a ritual area that deals about psychological matters, life, death, transcendence, the objections to the notion of reality.
The work required a complex pre-production in which many people collaborated in front of the cameras and behind them, putting structures in place in order to raise them, and a certain number of people and policemen blocking off the streets, preventing people, animals or vehicles from crossing within the frame of the photographs.
A typical street in Mechita (the old rail neighborhood built by the British in the early twentieth century) is suddenly transformed into a ritual territory for the villagers. People carry in a hand a box of matches with which, at sunset, will light their own fire. And hence, side by side, as a sort of collective ceremony, without even know it, they are making the architecture of the infinite.
3. In reference to your work and your position in the national and international art fields, what tradition do you recognize yourself in? Who are your contemporary referents? What artists of previous generations are of interest to you?
Maybe my work should be read as a thought that dialogues between nature and culture making quotations to all types of human knowledge. So, my constant references are about cinema, topology, politics, sexuality, philosophy, poetry, mythology, etc. The landscape and the nature, so present in my work, should not be seen as a mere natural geographical expression but as a psychical extension where I try to build mental concepts that seek to jump to other territories. A place of transformation and fulfillment, where I speak about the path as a fate, about the macro- and the microcosmic, the certainties of the affects and the dantesque immeasurable. Paintings, photographs and installations that reflect on the meaning of reality, of illusion, of the universal and regional, of man's dreams, are part of the images that I have developed.
I try to build, from my own experience, symbols that make up the universe of my paintings and photographs: the fire, the infinite horizon, the labyrinthine reading of the starry skies. Wrapping buildings of thought and culture are often represented as giant domes; these are some of the representations of my ideas: topological issues that ignoring the limits of matter and physics accompany the versatility of thought.
4. Choose works or exhibitions from the last ten or fifteen years which in your opinion were very significant and explain why
I identify with the tradition that took shape in the eighties. A type of art that joined languages, that lived with the discussion about the crisis of modernity, an art that took the legacy of conceptual art but returning with great force to the materiality of art, an art that emerged as a breath of fresh air and freedom after the barbarism of the bloodiest dictatorship in Argentina's history.
Curiously, some of my contemporaries are linked to cinema and video art. I think of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, because of the magic in his films, emphasizing the smallness of living, because of the intensity of the moment, because of the hidden side of the visible, and for making appear in his images other possible realities. And I also think of the video artist Bill Viola, with which I discovered a near sensitivity in his themes and climates: fire, water, life and death walk together, the mystery in the everyday life. The passage.
But in painting art I have always felt close to the ideas of Anselm Kiefer: the landscape in him is the place of Alchemy, the place of ritual and thinking, it is an example of deep reflection and conceptualization, but without losing the pictorial pleasure. James Turrell is also to be highlighted because of the real light transformed into a transcendent symbol, for setting environments that place the viewer in a more internal reality, engaging all their senses. And finally I mention Ana Mendieta, Walter de Maria and many other artists associated with the Land Art.
From previous generations, and for various reasons, the works of the Argentine Víctor Grippo and Marcelo Boneverdi always moved me. The generations after me there are many artists who I find interesting: Ernesto Ballesteros, Dino Bruzzone, Daniel García, Pablo Zicarello, Max Gómez Canle, Matías Duville, Nadia Gómez Kiener, Cinthia Levi, Ana Gallardo, Débora Pierpaoli, Marcelo Pombo, Sebastián Gordin, Juliana Ceci, etc.
