Alfredo Prior - Collaboration With Other Artists

Collaboration With Other Artists

In 1981 he presented a joint exhibition with Armando Rearte at Arte Múltiple Gallery. The eighties were already on the run….

During these years he consolidated his complicity with artists Armando Rearte, Rafael Bueno, Guillermo Kuitca and Osvaldo Monzó. They formed a group of an expansive interaction, surrounded by a cultural and political atmosphere which was continually changing. 1982 was a key year for the group, as Art critic Charlie Espartaco carried out a curatorial experience called La Anavanguardia, in which all of them participated.

In 1983 he participated in the exhibition: La Consagración de la Primavera, curated by Laura Buccelato and Charlie Espartaco, at Espacio Giesso. Armando Rearte, Osvaldo Monzo, Guillermo Kuitca and Prior, took part in the exhibition of paintings produced by the artists working together. This exhibition starts a new stage in Prior’s production, marked by different alliances and acquaintances that would produce works in collaboration with other artists and group projects.

Prior settled in a basement at 959 Riobamba Street, (a collective workshop, a space for exhibitions and occasional cabaret, called "La Zona", where he would remain for three years). At the same time, Sergio Avello – born in 1964– and other artists of his generation grouped together and held several exhibitions at La Zona.

By 1984, after his third exhibition, Prior’s personal canon, his private history of arts which ruled the political decisions of his imaginary, was already perfectly defined:

Many exhibitions took place in 1985. Prior was invited to exhibit at the 18th San Pablo’s Biennial. The poet and critic Edward Lucie-Smith, took interest in Prior’s work during the Biennial and contacted him in Buenos Aires.

The installation that both Kuitca and Prior presented at Fundación San Telmo in 1985 was, no doubt, the end of Prior’s greatest spontaneous collaboration with other artists. In that opportunity – which would be the last time they worked together– the effect was hypnotic.

Prior’s experiences formed collections or series of images in his work. References are the dauntless children who were born already combed, the so literary as imaginary Japanese geometry inspired in Aru Dutt, the clear Osarios, the ships soaked up with Informalist Art and the works in collaboration during the time he inhabited La Zona.

Thus, each picture by Prior begins to represent a piece of an immense puzzle, a puzzle in progress.

In a few months, almost simultaneously, Prior openly exposed the origin of his Napoleonic sagas and the first chapters of his Chinese Encyclopaedia, two thirds of his monumental system of systems. He wanted from the very beginning, to reformulate historical painting choosing Napoleon for his condition of archetypical character and the popular representation of madness, a man characterized like Napoleon. He later established the relation Insane=Napoleon=Artist, for there is a deep rooted tradition about the image of the artist being very close to a dark zone.