Composition pour les JO, 1992

Arden-Quin Carmelo  

Carmelo Arden Quin is an Uruguayan poet and visual artist born on March 16, 1913 in Rivera, Uruguay and died September 28, 2010.
He is considered a major historical figure of geometric abstraction (concrete art) and played a pioneering role in Latin America. After studying law in Brasil, he encountered Joaquin Torres Garcia in Montevideo in 1935 and then settled in Buenos Aires in 1938. He launched "Arturo" in 1944, the first Latin America magazine devoted to abstract arts and in 1948, he settled permanently in Paris.

He founded the group called "MADI" and "Arte Concreto-Invencion" with Gyula Kosice, in Buenos Aires in 1946, the group had as objective to invent a new art that was plural, transformable and playful at the same time,with the other artist of the group having a desired for change. This revolutionary vision in that time was inspired by Russian and German constructivists and by Joaquin Torrres-Garcia. The manifesto of the group was drafted in 1946 and the movement became very soon internationally successful. In June 1953, the manifesto was read at the Sorbornne.

The artistic aesthetics that Carmelo Arden Quin defends through MADI is founded on the dynamics of pure invention, on the idea of chance and combination. Arden Quin wishes an art without any restrictive rule or theory and an art that demands absolute freedom in the means of expression, form and materials. His only ambition is systematically to abandon the traditional frame of the painted canvas. This artistic ideal show us the path that brought the artist to the cinema in the 60s.

MADI is still recognized worldwide thanks to numerous exhibitions organized during the lasts years in the United States and Europe. One of the most recent one took place in 2008 in Paris