Jorge Eduardo Eielson

His mother belonged to a family in the capital and his father was of Scandinavian descent, (his grandfather had arrived in Peru toward the end of the previous century and settled there). After his father's untimely death, when Jorge was just seven years old, he was given a somewhat liberal education. From an early age he manifested marked artistic tendencies that were expressed in various ways, practicing the piano (the whole family loved music), drawing copiously, reciting parts of his favorite authors, and inventing objects out of whatever came his way. Eielson himself, in the course of an interview, will identify a link between his composite ethnic-cultural origins ("my four cultures," he says, "Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Nazca, referring in the latter case, to the ancient pre-Hispanic civilization of the coast of Peru) and the variety of his creative interests, not excluding scientific, philosophical and religious curiosity. At that time, the Peruvian capital is still untouched by the relentless degradation of more recent times (a degradation that Eielson will describe with visionary imagination in his novel Primera muerte de Maria in the late 1950s). There is relative economic stability, there are rich cultural ferments and open to influences from major international centers. The young man is thus and above all nourished by European culture. He learns English and French, reads Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Shelley, Eliot and other authors in the original languages, as well as the Spanish mystics and classics of the Golden Century and the Iberian poets of the twentieth century. He also reads the great poets of America, Poe and Whitman, Dario, Vallejo, Neruda and Borges.
Always restless, he changes schools several times until, toward the end of his secondary studies, he has as a Spanish language teacher the then-newcomer Jose Maria Arguedas, who, impressed by the teenager's talent, forms a fraternal friendship with him and introduces him, at a very young age, to the capital's artistic and literary circles. And it is Arguedas again who initiates him into the knowledge of ancient Peruvian cultures, almost unknown to the young man because of colonial-style teaching.
In 1945, at the age of twenty-one, Eielson won the National Poetry Prize and the following year a National Theater Prize. Also dating from those years are his first canvases where the influence of two very important artists in his training is evident: Klee and Miró. Eielson, who even then did not believe in academic teaching, made something of a concession to himself when, thanks to his friendship with the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Lima, the well-known Peruvian artist Ricardo Grau, he attended some drawing and painting classes for a time. But soon Grau himself, an educated and modern man trained in Paris in the Atelier of André Lhote, dissuades him from attending academia, deeming those studies unsuitable for him.
In 1948 Eielson exhibited for the first time in a gallery in the capital, the only one that existed at the time, a group of works that already testified to his natural versatility. The exhibition includes drawings, watercolors, oils, constructions with colored and burned woods, objects of surrealistic imprint and metal "movils" in the shape of spirals hanging from the ceiling. At the same time, he wrote for several local publications and, in collaboration with Jean Supervielle, son of the great French poet Jules Supervielle, edited an art and literature magazine with the premonitory title, "El Correo de Ultramar." Also in 1948, he made a trip to Paris thanks to a scholarship offered to him by the French government. In the great European metropolis the young Latin American felt at home. He immediately frequents the Latin Quarter, then in full existentialist effervescence, spends his days and nights in the caves of Saint-Germain des Près together with other writers and artists from all over the world, in that extraordinary hub of creativity that is postwar Paris.
It was then that he discovered the art of Piet Mondrian, and shortly afterwards, together with the Madi group (headed by Arden Quin and which in Buenos Aires included such adherents as Lucio Fontana, Tomás Maldonado, G. Kosice and others), he was invited to the first abstract art event, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, founded by André Bloc. Following this participation he also exhibits at Colette Allendy, one of the most interesting avant-garde galleries in Paris. This is the moment of his approach to Raymond Hains, to whom he will remain linked by a long friendship. Later, through Hains, he got to know the other members of the "nouveaux réalistes" group, with Pierre Restany as his spiritual mentor and lucid theoretician. Eielson then ended his geometric, constructivist, neo-plasticist phase and went to Switzerland on a UNESCO scholarship, awarded to him for his journalistic articles. There he meets Max Bill. In Geneva he returned to writing and, in 1951, he made the perhaps most important trip of his life, coming to Italy for a summer vacation of a few weeks in the company of the poet Javier Sologuren. As soon as he sets foot on the peninsula he realizes that he has found his chosen land. Arriving in Rome, he decides to stay there, begs his friend to have him send some books and personal effects, and thus begins his long and intense exploration of Latin roots.
Once again he won a competition, announced by the Cinecittà experimental center in Rome, to take a course in film directing - cinema is one of his great passions - but he did not stay long in the environment, disgusted by certain aspects. In 1953 he exhibited his "movils" at the Galleria dell'Obelisco, then the most important research space in the capital, and on this occasion he met Emilio Villa, who would write a sharp review of his work for the magazine "Arti Visive," which he directed. Among others, Villa introduces him to Alberto Burri and Ettore Colla, with the former of whom Eielson will entertain a stimulating relationship during the period of the "sacks," executed in the Via Aurora atelier. Giuseppe Capogrossi also became interested in his "movils" and introduced him to Carlo Cardazzo, who was about to open a gallery in Rome, but Eielson, determined to continue on his way, declined the gallerist's invitation and interrupted the phase of the "movils" just then.
While waiting to resume his visual research, he went almost every evening to Corrado Cagli's studio on Via del Circo Massimo, where the artist from Marche welcomed him with great sympathy and introduced him to Afro, Mirko, Salvatore Scarpitta, Richard Serra and others. In those years he also got to know some of the so-called "artists of the Piazza del Popolo," such as Piero Dorazio, Achille Perilli, Mimmo Rotella, Antonio Sanfilippo, Carla Accardi, Cy Twombly, and Matta, even before the advent of Italian pop art, in which Eielson felt no particular interest. It is during this same period that he writes one of his most important poetry collections, Habitación en Roma, and his two novels, El cuerpo de Giulia-no and Primiera muerte de María. It was also the time of his discovery of Zen Buddhism and his rejection of literature, with his landing on an iconic, visual and conceptual writing that would eventually bring him closer to the figurative arts.
"In 1959 Eielson resumed visual work, intent now on exploring his remote American roots. Abandoning the extreme avant-garde, he adopts heterogeneous materials, such as soils, sands (sometimes specially flown in from Peru), clays, marble and iron dust, as well as concrete with which he sculpts the surface of the painting, and with these materials he constructs an austere, desolate, abstract, almost metaphysical landscape, as that of the Peruvian coast is indeed." (www.jorgeeielson.org).
Thereafter, his landscapes gradually become populated with the human image, obtained through clothing of all sorts: shirts, jackets, blue-jeans, evening gowns, wedding dresses, socks, shoes, ties, gloves, hats, etc. This interest of his in the symbolism and social function of clothing is equally present in the aforementioned novels and in the poem Noche oscura del cuerpo, written then, and will be equally present later in his performances and installations. Through the manipulation of clothes - wrinkled, torn, burned, twisted and finally knotted - Eielson discovers his particular sensitivity to textiles. He soon identifies the great energy and beauty contained in the knot - moreover used as a real language of his pre-Columbian ancestors - and begins, in 1963, the first series of his "quipus" using brightly colored fabrics, knotted and stretched on the loom. He thus approaches a true cultural synthesis, plastic, magical and symbolic at the same time, namely the language of the ancient Amerindians - understood in its most visual aspect - in close harmony with one of the fundamental elements of Western art: the European loom. The canvas-frame duality, thus recomposed by the artist, now becomes a new aesthetic object that coincides, albeit with a different sign, with Fontana's "spatial concept," in which also the canvas-frame duality is highlighted as a single protagonist of the work. But the knot as such is found at every stage of civilization and ranges from the simple utilitarian function to the most sophisticated mythical, magical and sacred conceptions. Eielson is aware of this and does not pretend to rework any language, but rather to focus on a plastic and chromatic entity endowed with an almost unexplored archetypal content.
The preponderant place Eielson gives to the knot in his expressive code is surely due to the complex set of meanings it implies. The knot is for him a graphic sign, an aesthetic foundation, a core of color. And it is the welding point between his country's pre-Columbian past and its historical and artistic present. Other Latin American artists have sought in the Mayan and Aztec codes or other forms of pre-Hispanic art a sign that would come to modulate their contemporary language with the suggestion and depth of historical roots: so have Chilean Matta, Cuban Lam, Uruguayan Torres-Garcia and others. But only Eielson has been able to find an artistic and anthropological foundation in the Peruvian "quipus" and has been able to transform the ancient Quechua sign into the aesthetic and semantic core of an exquisitely contemporary language.
Eielson's knot is also the moment of encounter between his various expressive codes, from painting to canvases, to objects, to poetry, as well as between the two areas in which his material and metaphysical research takes place. It is visibly evidenced by two paintings with emblematic titles: Knots as Stars / Stars as Knots. So the knot also links the sky with the earth, the body with the sky, the soul with the bowels. Hence the endless variations of the same knot that exerts multiple tensions creating dynamic, diagonal, triangular or rhomboidal spaces that often lead to circular oases where the energy released by the knots relaxes more serenely. At other times, instead of the knot with its various tensions, there appear bundles of twisted fabrics, which are sometimes flags, sometimes garments, or pure games of colored or neutral fabrics (jute, cotton, cloth, velvet, etc.), but which can also appear as sculptural, three-dimensional objects, freed from any kind of surface or frame.
Beginning with the 1964 Venice Biennale, where he exhibited his first "knots," Eielson gained prestigious international recognition, participating in major exhibitions in museums such as MOMA or as part of the Nelson Rockefeller collection in New York, accepting repeated invitations to the Salon des Comparaisons in Paris, and exhibiting in private galleries. In 1967 he was in New York and frequented the Chelsea Hotel environment where he met the leading American artists of pop art and nascent conceptual art. Back in Paris, in the middle of May 1968, he actively participated in that particular period that would so profoundly mark his creativity.
In 1969 he was invited to the landmark exhibition "Plans and Projects as Art" at the Kunsthalle Zurich, where he presented a work entitled Underground Sculpture, a series of five imaginary and unrealizable objects to be buried in different cities on the planet he frequented (Paris, Rome, New York, Eningen and Lima). At midnight on December 16, 1969, in the space of Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, the "inauguration" of the Underground Sculpture is held in Eielson's presence, while in the other chosen cities the "burials" take place simultaneously.
That same year Eielson proposes to the U.S. space agency the placement of one of his "sculptures" on the Moon. NASA responds by suggesting a future date, since for the time being the event is unfeasible under the "Apollo Project."
Later Eielson will propose the scattering of his ashes on the surface of the Moon, believing that since time immemorial Earth's satellite has been nothing more than an ideal cemetery for poets.
Other similar works follow: the Underground Ballet on a moving subway car in Paris; the performance Nage in the Paris countryside; the Concert of Peace at Documenta 5 in Kassel, at the invitation of Harald Szeemann; the performance El cuerpo de Giulia-no, based on the novel of the same name, at the 1972 Venice Biennale; the performance Grande Quipus of nations at the Munich Olympics, interrupted by known terrorist incidents; and the performance Paracas-Pyramid at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, formerly directed by Joseph Beuys.
In 1976, the novel El cuerpo de Giulia-no, already published in Mexico in 1971 through the interest of Octavio Paz, whom Eielson has known since his Parisian years, was published in French by the publisher Albin Michel, obtaining a warm reception from critics. That same year Eielson makes a trip to Venezuela, where he presents Paracas-Pyramid and an exhibition of photographs at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas. He then continues on to Peru, where the Instituto de Cultura gives the majority of his poetic work in print under the title Poesía escrita. He exhibits in private galleries and devotes himself fervently to the study of pre-Columbian art, with particular emphasis on pre-Hispanic textiles, which he considers to be among the most extraordinary products of textile art of all times, endowed with a freshness and modernity that never cease to amaze, as evidenced by the suggestion from exerted on artists such as Klee, Miró, Picasso, Mondrian, Torres García, Matta, up to Keith Haring and others. In 1978 he was granted the Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature in New York, and in 1979 he exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. This was followed by essays on pre-Columbian art, such as Puruchuco, El arte y la religión Chavín, Escultura precolombiana de cuarzo, Light and transparency in the textiles of ancient Peru, as well as miscellaneous articles.
His activity in the visual arts continued with solo exhibitions at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1986, the III Bienal de Trujillo in Peru in '87, the Centro Cultural de la Municipalidad de Miraflores in Lima, and the Venice Biennale in '88.
In 1987 his novel Primera muerte de María was published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico, and in '90 a conspicuous anthology of his poems was published by the Vuelta publishing house in Mexico City, directed by Octavio Paz; again in '90, invited by Paz, he participated in the exhibition "Los privilegios de la vista" at the Centro Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo in the same city and held a solo show at the Istituto Italo Latinoamericano in Rome, which marked his return to artistic activity in Italy and put an end - perhaps - to a geographic and cultural nomadism that had enriched and diversified his modes of expression but also brought him some misunderstanding, in the literary as in the artistic field. Suffice it to consider the variety of his visual proposals: although the "quipus" is his central invention, Eielson also practices a very personal painting that is a brilliant reinterpretation of pre-Hispanic textile art.
He makes objects and installations inspired mostly by his own writings, but also by the texts of others. On a literary level, Eielson is today considered one of the major Spanish-language poets (his poems are translated into twelve languages), although he has never accepted that definition, preferring to be considered, depending on the work he does, simply as "a worker of the word, a worker of the image, a worker of color, a worker of space, and so on."
In this regard, on several occasions Eielson has tried to clarify his position, which is not simplistically contestative towards a system that always demands the same "product," but rather corresponds to his inner freedom. A freedom that has allowed him to move from one field to another of contemporary artistic expression with extreme naturalness and that has enabled him to develop a global, cosmopolitan, planetary vision. The actuality of his research lies precisely in this continuous "displacement" in order to create a kind of network of interactive relations between rationality and magic, between sacred and profane, between affectivity and concept, between visual and verbal, between archaic and modern. A twin universe of what contemporary physics reveals to us, which admits of no hierarchy, no fixed point, no "fundamental brick."
Very important for a complete evaluation of his work were the latest events: the large retrospective organized in 1993 in Milan at the Credito Valtellinese Gallery; the exhibition at the Taideteolisuusmuseo in Helsinki, Finland; the solo show in 1998 at the Galleria Lorenzelli in Milan; and numerous publications dedicated to him, including the latest monograph edited by Il Chiostro Arte Contemporanea in Saronno in 2003.

Major museums where his works are kept:

Gori Collection, Fattoria di Celle, Santomato, Pistoia
Designmuseo - Finnish Museum of Arts and Design, Helsinki, Finland
Credito Valtellinese Gallery, Milan
IAC, Institute of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin
Moma, Nelson Rockefeller Collection, New York
National Trust for historical Preservation, Washington, U.S.A.

Bibliography:

Eielson, Catalogo della mostra, Milano, Galleria Lorenzelli, marzo 1963; Jorge Eielson, Catalogo della mostra, Galleria Lorenzelli, novembre/dicembre 1972; Contreras-Brunet, Eielson, Lam, Roca-Rey, Istituto Italo-Latino Americano, Roma, XXXVI Biennale Venezia, 1972, giugno/ottobre; Jorge Eielson. “Nodi corde tensioni” Bergamo, galleria Fumagalli, gennaio/febbraio 1992; A. Boatto, L.M. Barbero, Jorge Eielson, Saronno, Il Chiostro Arte Contemporanea, 2003.