The Gesture of Abstract Photography at the Larivière Foundation

Rabid or minimalist, the gesture of abstract photography at the Larivière Foundation
Discovered in artists' studios, Jean-Louis Larivière established abstraction as a line of study within his extensive collection of Latin American photography.
He followed this path with Alexis Fabry, curator of the exhibition that occupies Room 1 of his space.
The possibility that photography maintains in relation to what is captured as something existing—a clear node within what the device proposes—is conditioned by focus. This has been happening for a few decades in a key aspect. From the photographic cutout produced by focusing, segments of any captured reality are obtained that function as a work in itself, reflecting what the author's eye can see in what it sees.

But the exhibition "Photographic Abstractions," which can be visited at the Larivière Foundation, curated by Alexis Fabry and featuring a highly evocative exhibition design by Juan Lo Bianco, reveals the other node that involves the term "abstract" in relation to photography. It has to do with experimentation in the process that appeals both to photosensitive emulsion—capable of being modified by various chemical factors—and to photos that are "copied" directly when placed between light and a plate sensitive to light exposure.
The reasons for this reduction within a collection of more than 400 photographers have to do with the use of the noun conveyed by the title, something made very clear in the curator's words. "The exhibition oscillates freely, depending on Jean-Louis Larivière's inclinations, between two of his inspirations: on the one hand, informalism and abstract expressionism, and on the other, the geometries of cold America," says Fabry, a friend of the collector and founder of the space in La Boca, with whom he shares a passion for photography.

Jean-Louis doesn't feel that abstract photography occupies a significant place in the overall corpus, but "it's certainly present and has been since the inception of the collection," he says, referring to the foundation's first exhibition in 2022. "I saw an opportunity to show photographic materials that were very different and complementary to those exhibited in the densely populated Dreams of the Spider Woman. They were radical materials, spurred by experimentation, as were many works in the inaugural exhibition."
Thus, in Photographic Abstractions, a line of study within the collection of Latin American artists, one can find León Ferrari and Julio Le Parc, who usually relied on other devices for their work, as well as very interesting variations on the works of Sameer Makarius and the Colombian Jorge Ortiz, very close to pictorial abstraction, based on experimentation, where the camera loses its importance in favor of focusing on the photographic process and the freedom that the laboratory implies.

Among those who produce cutouts with this approach, the Argentine artists Andrea Ostera, Jorge Roiger, and Facundo de Zuviría stand out, highlighting the geometric substance or formal harmony of an architecture that appears drawn. Juan Travnik and the Colombian Santiago Rebolledo stand out for capturing remains, the traces left on walls where something happened that barely become a subtle presence.

Víctor Robledo and Geraldo de Barrios, the former Colombian and the latter Brazilian, use the window as an intermediary between two visions, ranging from what the light reflects on the angle of a hanging glass work to what that pseudo-screen cuts out, revealing something simple yet curious: wires that function almost like black lines.

Chilean Cristián Silva-Avária cuts to achieve a pictorial abstraction à la Mark Rotko, and Colombian Fernell Franco, who had an interesting solo exhibition last year, almost obliterates the trace of what was captured by the haphazard processing of the print subjected to the elements of the rain. Another point in Fabry's text relates to a certain origin of the photographer's documentary approach, stating that "the walls of the Americas, eaten away by saltpeter, bruised by impact, or vibrant with vivid colors, represented an inexhaustible subject for many photographers. But a growing number of artists chose to abandon the photographic record and replace it with a direct confrontation with photosensitive paper, both inside and outside the darkroom. The gesture betrays rage, is sometimes expressive, but since the 2000s, it has more often been meticulously minimalist."

To better understand the scope of this collection, in conversation with Jean-Louis Larivière, we touched on the concept of "Latin American photography" and its history.