Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

[rhead – r]Parallel Modernities 

[rhead – v]Ticio Escobar 

[artitle]Parallel Modernities. Notes on Artistic Modernity in the 

Southern Cone of Latin America: The Case of Paraguay 

[au]Ticio Escobar 

[trans]Translated by Hilary Macartney 

[source]First published in Spanish as “Modernidades Paralelas. Notas 

sobre la modernidad artística en el cono sur: el caso paraguayo,” El 

arte fuera de sí, 2004 

[abs]Abstract 

The author of this article is one of the most important intellectuals in 

the Latin American artistic scene. Focusing on the particular case of 

Paraguay, which was governed by the dictatorship of Alfred Stroessner 

from 1954 until 1989, Escobar traces the modernist impulse in 

Paraguay and traces its complicated and disturbed relationship with 

European and North American models and antecedents: Neo-

Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Abstraction, and similar. 

While they reflect the particular political conditions under which the 

artists worked, the diverse and many-voiced Paraguayan responses 

also offer an exemplary set of responses that shed light on the 

development twentieth-century modernist art and visual culture 

across the broader South American continent. 

[key]Keywords: Paraguay, Latin Americas, modern art, colonialism, 

post-colonialism, dictatorship, Mestizo, Creole, Hispano-Guarini, 

Martinfierrista Revolution, Arte Nuevo, Los Novísimos, 

postmodernism, utopia, re-figuration 

[inta]Introduction by Gabriela Siracusano 

[intx]In this article, Ticio Escobar, one of the most outstanding Latin 

American art critics, aims to put into discussion the several and 

disrupted ways modernity takes place in the Latin American artistic 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

scene, focusing on Paraguay. By rethinking the tension between 

central and peripheric models and the debate around the concepts of 

appropriation, transgression, copy, distortion, or infidelity, the author 

shows how modern artistic language in Paraguay found its way in 

order to create a different modernity. Escobar describes some 

significant moments of the development of Modern art in Paraguay 

named by him as: Modernidades (from 1950 to the first half of the 

1980s), Desmodernidades (1985 to 1995), and Modernidades Paralelas 

(1995 to the present). The key to this classification is supported by an 

interaction between art and politics, which the author aims to explain 

in order to offer to the reader some indicators through which to 

understand the cultures in question. From an anthropological point of 

view and related to his position as art critic, Escobar analyzes present 

modernities in which urban and native-indigenous artists, artisans, 

and community groups find their way to creation between the local 

and the global, the popular and the modern. Finally, this text gives an 

original and significant view of how modernity in art must be 

conceived in the roots of cultural diversity, and how global art history 

and visual studies should consider its variety of forms and the ways in 

which this variety develops in peripheral art scenes. 

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[artitle]Parallel Modernities. Notes on Artistic Modernity in the 

Southern Cone of Latin America: The Case of Paraguay. 

[au]Ticio Escobar 

[a]Introduction 

[b]Distortions 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

[tx]The question of modernity, and particularly that of modernity on 

the periphery, has constituted a central theme in the debate on Latin 

American art from the beginning. This article uses this question as the 

nucleus from which to examine briefly three historical moments (not 

necessarily occurring sequentially) that are defined around it in the 

realm of artistic practice: the cycle of modernity affiliated to the avant-

garde, critical postmodern positions, and popular modernities. These 

moments are considered in the light of the disruptions through which 

modern developments are produced: those that derive from hegemonic 

relationships at a global level (the asymmetries between the art of the 

metropoles and that of the peripheries) and those caused by the 

inevitable faults in the mechanisms of representation (the imbalances 

between the languages of art and the realities designated). 

[txt]The first dislocation stems from the different positions that 

peripheral cultures occupy in relation to the figures proposed or 

imposed by central modernity. Even though hegemony is no longer 

exerted from geographical locations, nor enunciated in absolute terms, 

the different positions the centers assume with regard to its precepts 

or its siren songs continue to constitute a fundamental reference in 

Latin American art, defined largely by exchanges of glances that 

intersect with the center, by struggles over meaning. And thus, the 

tension between central models and appropriated forms, transgressed 

or copied by the peripheries, or imposed on them, constitutes a theme 

that remains current and requires continual reassessment. 

This conflict occurred from the outset and, in a way, continues to 

occur. European colonization of Latin American territories was based 

on a systematic program of substitution of indigenous cultures with 

metropolitan ones. But the designs on domination can never be 

entirely realized. And this is the case not only because the strategies 

for power get out of control to a certain extent, but also because the 

areas of the symbol are essentially mistaken and cover a central 

vacuum that cannot be completely filled. Even the harshest processes 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

of cultural domination, the most ferocious cases of ethnocide, cannot 

cover the whole field of colonization and leave, to their regret, a vacant 

fringe. In this waste land difference operates: from there, first the 

indigenous peoples, and then the Mestizos and Creoles, sometimes 

produced particular (sub)versions, works that were able to seize some 

moment of truth of their own and, in this way, escape the spurious 

fate assigned to them by the colonial plan. In many cases, the 

indigenous people began meticulously to imitate Western patterns and 

ended up bending the meaning of the models. Likewise, in the course 

of the split time which then began, the best forms of Latin American 

art were (are) those that were able to affirm themselves in that brief 

void exposed by the disruption of power and the misplacements of the 

image, and to nourish themselves with the condensed energies that 

took refuge there. 

The modernity of Latin American art develops out of the mistakes 

created by the central modern language in naming other histories or 

in being named by other subjects. Its best forms originate in 

equivocations and misunderstandings, involuntary wrongs and 

inevitable lapses. But they also arise out of the distortions produced 

by successive copies, out of the difficulties in adopting signs that 

assume different techniques, motives, and sensibilities and, of course, 

out of the conscious attempt to adulterate the meaning of the 

prototype. Thus, many works intended to constitute degraded 

transcriptions of metropolitan models recover their originality as, 

through error, inefficiency, or transgressive will, they betray the 

course of the first meaning. Faithful, at times, to their anticolonialist 

aspirations or to the rhythm of their own times; prisoners, at other 

times, of vain acts, blunders, and confusions, the Latin American 

avant-garde movements made dramatic alterations to the tenses, 

logic, and contexts of the modern proposals. This prolific violation of 

the central paradigms is observed not only in the reflective tendencies 

of modern art but also in its most irrational moments, the necessary 

counterparts of modernity. On the one hand, Latin American art does 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

not want, or is not able, to follow the plundered, analytical, and self-

referential modern path. On being transplanted to Latin America, the 

rationalist movements are rapidly contaminated by the imperatives of 

a history that require the disengagement of the self-sufficient compass 

of language. On the other hand, in Latin America, even the forms that 

follow the most irrational directions incorporate organizing principles 

and formalist solutions that serve to underpin, if not to put in order, 

an image more threatened by obscure outbursts than by conceptual 

excesses. 

The second disconnection (common in all forms of modern art) arises 

from the disjuncture between the signs of art and the reality that they 

pursue. Superimposed on the previous discrepancy, this redoubles 

the distortions of peripheral modernity and increases its waste lands. 

Perhaps the most important art of Latin America occurs in the open 

space exposed by these imbalances. This is because the works 

nourished by knots of conflict and grown in no-man’s land toughen 

and temper their forms through the hard determination required to 

survive; the strongest Latin American artistic production is reinforced 

by its link with the raw nerves of history. Placed in extreme points of 

tension, courageously suspended in the void, artists manage to invert 

adversity, appealing to powerful figures, producing substantial works 

that signify not exactly the surmounting of conflict or expressions of 

their hidden reality, but charged and vigorous ciphers, capable of 

expounding in rhetorical code the great questions of the moment. 

These works show the impact of the distortions that cause the transfer 

of signs and accumulate the passage of history. It is not their role to 

correct them, but through them, art can relocate the positions from 

which meaning is disputed. Thus, paradoxically, the distortions 

caused by modern asymmetries enable certain productions of the 

peripheries fleetingly to achieve an unexpected, desperate clarity of 

focus that the models of the metropolis themselves, content with their 

advantages, absorbed by great commitments, or dimmed by 

postmodern apathies, take longer to achieve. 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

With these considerations as its starting point, this article seeks to 

emphasize some significant moments of the evolution of the modern 

art produced in the Southern Cone of Latin America. It does so by 

considering certain aspects of the history of the art of Paraguay, 

whose circumstances, questions, and responses can be schematically 

compared with those of the regional artistic production. On the other 

hand, this history, isolated for centuries and doubly peripheral, 

presents several basic problems in a clear and concentrated form that 

facilitates its analysis. Obviously, this work in no way claims to cover 

the whole spectrum of modern art in Paraguay: it refers strictly to 

some productions which serve to illustrate the concepts and support 

the arguments. Thus, many of the fundamental names of the history 

of this art are not mentioned and, by the same token, other, 

sometimes lesser, names appear, which serve to exemplify particular 

directions. 

[b]Histories 

[tx]Even though it often tries to cover its scars, the art produced in 

Paraguay is marked, like any other, by the accidents, fractures, and 

silences that jar and quell the successive undercurrents of its time. 

Given that all artistic production is considered within the sphere of 

the theory of representation and, therefore, becomes charged with the 

responsibility of giving clues about what is going on outside itself, the 

question is to determine the extent to which peripheral forms can do 

so. That is, up to what point can they take account of their own 

histories, forms colonized by other systems of representation, forms 

dependent on hegemonic models and, later, forms kept hidden by 

official history or directly suffocated by dictatorship? When we talk 

about “taking account,” we assume that the corresponding testimony 

will always be based on a biased and partial record, truly partisan; an 

obscure and coded way of saying what cannot be said, not so much 

because it is forbidden but because it has no name. 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

[txt]With regard to the antecedents of this complicated history, let us 

set aside the indigenous pre-Colombian worlds, not because they lack 

importance, but because they are resistant to being placed in the 

categories of Western history of art. Let us begin, then, by mentioning 

the Colony that signified a process of dismantling native cultures and 

of violent imposition of the imperial languages. And so, as far as a 

suitable position can be taken with regard to this situation (whether of 

resigned acceptance or angry rejection, complacent appropriation or 

calculated seizure), colonial art manages to define particular 

expressive forms. The so-called “Hispano-Guaraní art,” produced by 

the indigenous peoples in the Franciscan, and especially Jesuit, 

missions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, preserves 

in its origin the memory of brutal processes of ethnocide and 

resentment, of emptiness and persecution (Figure 1). [TS – Figure near 

here] But its forms do not faithfully translate these conflicts, and they 

certainly do not resolve them, either in reality or symbolically. They 

simply affirm, enlivened by their tensions, by the effort involved in 

confronting them, by the energies they release—perhaps. 

Like the ancient, indigenous Guaranís who began submissively 

copying the baroque models and ended up dismantling the meaning of 

the prototypes, so too, many other forms are capable of twisting the 

course of the design imposed by the hegemonic direction. Popular art 

produced during the nineteenth century was strengthened despite, 

and by means of (and perhaps thanks to), grand foreign ideals and 

ferocious battles: engravings in the newspapers of the war1 constitute 

a compendium of Creole-Guaraní humor, of rural sensibility and its 

perceptive sketches, of second-hand European portrait art, of 

romantic and neoclassical forms known through reproductions, of the 

great nationalist proclamations of Marshal López, etc. (Figure 2). [TS – 

Figure 2 near here] But their images escape the mere formulation in 

image code of what that tense and confusing reality would have been. 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

This is because the actions of art transcend the different forces that 

intervene in history. And, in this context, I would like the verb 

“transcend” not to be read in idealistic or dialectical code: to 

transcend signifies here simply to go beyond the edges supporting 

them; to penetrate beyond the concrete factors conditioning a creative 

act in order to gain an extended view simultaneously from the inside 

and the outside; to feed on the intimate forces of a situation in order 

to detach oneself to some extent from it and be able to name it fully, 

the image being contaminated with the details of memory, open to the 

desire of a moment that history cannot record because it does not yet 

exist. 

Modern Paraguayan art coincides in its development with the long 

period of the military dictatorship of Alfred Stroessner (1954–89). This 

does not mean that the former was a consequence of the latter, but 

neither does it necessarily mean that it constituted the reverse. 

However, it is indisputable that the great figures of artistic modernity 

grew up in Paraguay endorsed by the characteristics of that dark 

period: they suffered the dictatorship, they expressed it, they faced its 

proposals, displayed its moments; perhaps in some way they 

legitimized others. All forms both validate and challenge history; this 

ambivalence allows other sides of things to be suggested. Present-day 

art in this country coincides with the disenchantment of a confused 

Transition to Democracy that is setting up an unprecedented scene of 

new public liberties at the same time as it is also preserving the 

scheme of power hatched under the dictatorship. But it also coincides 

with the banalizing expansion of the cultural industries, with 

experiences of regional integration whose implications elude us, with 

the emergence of new scenarios of corruption, violence, and misery, 

and even with stubborn hopes that are advancing in the opposite 

direction. The most solid artistic expressions will be those capable of 

naming this convulsed or too tepid present from the very depths of its 

complicated interior and out of the old and vain zeal to forget it or 

transform it. This is because everything that speaks from the 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

immediacy of the events and across the insurmountable distance of 

desire opens up a space from which to watch the situation and, in 

front of it, to imagine a form. A beautiful, obscure form that can give 

to history only coded clues that hint at the angle of the direction and, 

briefly, another path. 

[b]Notes on Methods 

[tx]In a necessarily simplified form, for reasons of length, this work 

takes modernity as its central theme and studies the different 

positions of the art of Paraguay with regard to its patterns, its 

traditions—such as it has—and the pompous display of its forms. The 

development of this theme is carried out in three sections. The first, 

Modernities, refers to the saga of modern Paraguayan art (from the 

1950s to the first half of the 1980s). The second, Demodernities, deals 

with production by sectors which regain a protest position during the 

confused period of the so-called Transition to Democracy, a stage 

begun after the fall of the dictatorship and coinciding with the 

criticism of modernity (the middle of the eighties to the middle of the 

nineties).2 The third section, Parallel Modernities, concerns certain 

specific entries within modernity. Starting from the relevance of codes 

that are very deep rooted in their respective cultural traditions, certain 

popular sectors develop their own responses to the challenges of 

modernity; responses which, in many cases, end up constituting a 

refutation of the modern program and, in fact, tally with certain 

contemporary objections (questionings of formal autonomy, originality, 

good taste, stylistic relevance, etc.). 

[txt]These three moments are considered in terms of their differences 

from modern and postmodern paradigms respectively. Indeed, all the 

peripheral postures assumed around modernity imply different 

degrees of translation, of betrayal, of the modern ideology. As its 

figures and its discourses are differentiated or reappropriated, 

modernity suffers important distortions. So much so that the essential 

notes of its concept come to compromise and at times to hinder the 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

possibility of talking about the modernity of certain forms of art. But 

this misunderstanding constitutes the central point of any theory 

about difference in art. Distortion, mistiming, infidelity of 

transcription open up possibilities for the particular. As already 

acknowledged, the disconnection produced by differentiation 

facilitates a margin for the inscription of difference. But, even at an 

angle and fleetingly, the distortion of the central models suggests not 

only a defense against the tyrannizing expansion of the modern logos 

but also an exit in the middle of the depressed postmodern Western 

landscape. 

Subirats calls certain Luso-Hispanic cultural productions and “the 

modern artistic contribution of the countries of the Third World” in 

general Avant-gardes of the South. And he sees in them “a 

contribution to the aesthetic of modernity and postmodernity often 

obliquely slanted in the essays of theoretical interpretation of the 

avant-gardes.”3 Thus, against the grain of the end-of-century mood, 

this article has a certain inevitable optimistic tone. To read the art 

produced in one region or country—like that realized elsewhere—

following strictly the milestones that mark certain itineraries of 

meaning, necessarily yields a favorable balance. And it does so 

because it considers only the outstanding points and leaves aside a 

large part of the artistic production of that place, the majority of it, if 

not more, mediocre like that of anywhere else. 

The first section is developed from a modern reading of modernity. 

This is because one possible way of following certain clues to modern 

art is to travel its much trodden routes, perhaps making out other 

directions from the corner of one’s eye. Thus, in order to revise the 

modern itinerary it can prove effective in some cases (in this one) not 

so much to question its evolution, impelled by the course ordained by 

Reason and its marked direction, but to surmount this current. They 

could discern from within other channels and other shores; impetuous 

flows that advance in the other direction; secret tributaries, new 



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volumes that overflow the level previously fixed. In the case of the art 

of Paraguay, the detailed observance of a modern logic of styles can 

express not so much the adherence to a strange rationality as the 

necessity to seek an ordering principle in the middle of a too obscure 

history, the desire to inscribe temporality in a petrified landscape. 

Thus, in order to study the modernity of Paraguay it can prove fruitful 

to do so in historicist code: to analyze its own logical developments 

and compare the imbalances of its stages in relation to the stages of 

the modern art which serves as its guide. Through those lapses in 

synchronization, its own rhythm can be stressed. The last two 

sections resist being read in sequential code and promote a more 

disordered approach. 

[a]I. Modernities 

[b]Broken Modernity 

[tx]Artistic modernity began very late in Paraguay. Officially, it 

happened with the opening of an exhibition of the Arte Nuevo group in 

1954. That same year the dictatorship of General Alfred Stroessner 

began, whose shadows gathered over the country’s history during 

more than three decades and whose signature still marks the difficult 

present. Modern art completed its cycle in the course of those 35 

years; it can be said—if it were possible to establish an exact date for 

such occurrences—that it reached the culmination of its process at 

the end of the 1980s. That is, in the same period in which Stroessner 

was overthrown and a different age commenced. Even protected from 

the temptation of determinist simplifications, it is a fact that this 

coincidence sealed the evolution of modern Paraguayan art, whose 

images could not be separated from the adverse climate that besieged 

its production. 

[txt]The entire project of modernity carries stigmas of the time of 

Stroessner. It is a cloistered and doubly peripheral modernity;4 an 

obscure and disarticulated modernity, unevenly formed by the 

corruption that created opulent oligarchies and by the many forms of 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

oppression and marginality that regularly renewed the old miseries. A 

modernity deformed by the coarse militarist myths of the “national 

being” and implanted at the margin of modern ideology: without civil 

liberties or political guarantees, Stroessner’s military dictatorship 

ruled (or tried to rule) citizens who were silent, silenced. A modernity, 

then, profoundly contradictory, like many Latin American modernities. 

Undoubtedly simplified, this was the basis of the history. Upon it was 

sketched the modern project of the arts in Paraguay. Its programmatic 

bases interpreted faithfully enough the great principles and strategies 

of the international avant-gardes. Nevertheless, the burden of history 

itself was so heavy that, under its weight, that project ended up 

adulterating, if not being ignorant of, many of the fundamental 

suppositions of modernity. 

[b]Redemptions, Falsifications 

[tx]The question is complicated because, in itself, the development of 

modern art carries its own paradoxes. On the one hand, it is centered 

on the autonomy of the signifier: it begins to define itself from the 

specificity of language, from the reign of the form. Thus, concrete 

artistic processes correspond to moments in the development of 

forms—styles that are linked almost in syllogistic form and are 

considerable, nevertheless, in their internal order. On the other hand, 

this unpredictable, self-reflective evolution is obliged to take account 

of reality and even to amend it. Just as elsewhere, modern art is, from 

the start, committed to rectifying society and redeeming history in a 

direction which contradicts the very autonomy of its signs. This 

contradiction was the cause of anxious attempts to reconcile form and 

content (signifier and signified, language and object, art and society, 

etc.). But it was also a fertile source of the best moments of modernity. 

[txt]Resolving this tension between the disdainful seclusion of its field 

and its passionate commitments to history has charged modern forms 

with energy. How can this opposition be resolved between faithfulness 

to the diaphanous order of the signs, on the one hand, and duties to 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

the turbulent dominions of society, existence, and “objectivity,” on the 

other? How does the self-absorption of the language adapt to a project 

beset by temporality, thrown outside itself towards the clear course 

that utopia signals? Here a founding charter of modernity appears: 

those contradictions can be overcome through the action of the avant-

garde movements, by means of permanent innovation that forces the 

language to the limit, obliging it to release other names of the reality 

out of which to transform it. 

Modern art is conscious of its own development in the course of stages 

that synthesize successive contradictions according to a coherent 

sequence driven by the avant-garde movements. The latter develop an 

impeccable choreography: they move assuming positions around 

precise problems that unfold their questions and find responses in 

counter-positions which, in turn, will pose their queries according to 

the order of a well-oriented guide. But, on being projected onto 

barbarous terrains, these secret rationalities become distorted. Or are 

obliged to readapt themselves to the requirements of other times and 

other rhythms. 

[b]The Premoderns 

[tx]Dark and enclosed times; staccato rhythms, strident, quiet. 

Although, it has been said, the avant-garde slogans were late in 

appearing in Paraguay, the ground was quietly being prepared for 

them through a slow and relatively long route. When, once the War of 

the Triple Alliance against Paraguay is over in 1870, this country is 

ready to resume the course of a devastated history, it does so from a 

base of utter dependency. In 1906 the first recipients of scholarships 

are sent to Italy to be trained in the profession of the “Fine Arts.” 

However, they go there not because Italy is of much interest to 

Paraguay, but because it was of considerable significance to 

Argentina, whose aesthetic models of the beginning of the century 

came from the old Italian academies. Paraguay then, receives the 

models filtered through regional submetropoles: primarily Buenos 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

Aires and, later, São Paolo, and thus sums up, in a way, the path of 

European/North American art through the mediation of River Plate 

and Brazilian models. The wages of being a colony of colonies, as 

Eduardo Galeano would say. But what is interesting about these 

duplicated mediations is that, with so much traffic and handling, the 

paradigms end up losing definition and potency. And the artists, such 

as there are, have opportunities to exploit the natural erosion that the 

twice-copied original suffers and of working on the imbalance exposed 

by the difference. The second-hand copy, the bad copy, has always 

been a good ally when it comes to reversing the meaning of colonial 

signs. 

[txt]But the mediations not only adulterate the original codes, they 

also displace their effects. And so, in this way, in passing through the 

successive lock-gates of hegemonies and subhegemonies, the time 

that elapses within the subcolony between the exemplar and its copy 

is extended. Such a delay, of relevance in a process obsessed by being 

up to date, offers the opportunity for local artists to take up the 

foreign forms according to the rhythm of their own times. The first 

scholarship holders brought from Italy a form of painting framed 

within a fin-de-siècle academism confusedly stuffed with loose 

ingredients from romantic and realist systems that were not fully 

digested. But this image is incubated by secret renovative principles 

that go on to be manifested later according to the requirements of 

different occasions: they come to the surface encouraged by 

circumstances of their own and induced by influences from Buenos 

Aires, which sends weak Impressionist tremors during the 1910s 

(Exhibition of the Argentinian Centenary, which was attended by 

Paraguayan painters) and delegates expressive and constructive 

reinforcements of Postimpressionist origin from the following decade 

on. But these novelties do not yet have a mission of rupture: they do 

not enter into dispute with the naturalist concept of representation; 

they scarcely dynamize it. Exempted from the obligation to dismantle 

an academic tradition that it did not have, Paraguayan painting did 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

not encounter any conflict between Fine Arts representation and 

modernist figuration, which was slowly gestating in the background of 

bucolic landscapes and stiff historical portraits. 

Nevertheless, Paraguay’s delay, its redoubled dependence, and its 

isolation carry on designing a modernity that is solitary and different, 

differentiated. The painters lend a hand to successive stylistic 

elements, not following the internal impulses of a necessary process 

but responding to the requirements, always delayed, of subtropical 

climates. Neither the break with the past, already mentioned, nor the 

enunciation of a utopian ideology, nor the displays of modernization 

signified themes or motifs that preoccupied or seduced the premodern 

artists at that time. 

However, they could not avoid a condition that seems to be 

indispensable for the development of peripheral modernity: the faithful 

observance of each one of the stages traced by the historical route of 

the avant-garde movements. But compliance with this requisite was 

secured to the detriment of another, which ended up distorting the 

meaning of the first: the successive steps delineating the sequence did 

not control the tendencies and movements charged with carrying out 

the great modern missions. Whether this was, at first, through the 

scarcity of artists and means; or whether it was, later, through the 

pressures of the dictatorship (the latter opposed to the constitution of 

collectives that might conceal subversive programs) or through 

characteristics particular to the local temperament, what is certain is 

that, in general, the itinerary of modernity was controlled by 

individuals. During the early decades, only one artist represented one 

stage, one current: a necessary link so that the process could 

reproduce the whole exemplary sequence. Thus, Juan Samudio, one 

of the first scholarship holders, embodies the Impressionist moment. 

A timid and conciliatory Impressionism, as we saw, but sufficient to 

respond to the necessities of his time and to tick the corresponding 

box. 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

Representing the Impressionist moment against the background of a 

time that seemed frozen allowed many of the modern struggles and 

upsets to be prevented; the effort had taken up nearly quarter of a 

century. Suddenly history appears to be accelerated; the great war 

waged against Bolivia, the so-called Guerra del Chaco (1932–5), 

prompts conflicts as yet hardly contained to surface and reveals a 

convulsed scene, shaken by the crisis of political hegemony that will 

explode in the revolution of 1947 and will only be resolved in 1954 

with the rise of Stroessner to power. The second stage begins in the 

middle of the thirties (Samudio dies in 1937, as if to draw a line). 

Perhaps under pressure from the postwar mood of urgency, that stage 

summarizes in its way, in the course of two decades, the 

Postimpressionist panorama prior to the eruption of the European 

isms of the beginning of the century. This summary, as we already 

know, is sketched via Buenos Aires: it consists, in reality, of an 

interpretation extracted from the Postimpressionism of the River Plate 

prior to the Martinfierrista revolution of 1924 (preliminary to those 

isms of Buenos Aires). A late version, adapted to the necessity of 

naming a different history, too different. 

According to a possible (simplified and modern) reading of modern art, 

the Impressionist moment flows into a sphere known as 

“Postimpressionism,” ruled by the figures of Cézanne, Gauguin, Van 

Gogh, and the Symbolists. From this quadrivium the historical avant-

garde movements are drawn: Cubism starts out from the first of these 

figures; Expressionism takes the second two as its reference; 

Surrealism will follow the way marked by the Symbolists. By being 

transplanted and re-transplanted, and by being so on foreign soils, 

this scheme undergoes important alterations. But the most profound 

changes do not derive so much from the re-adaptations required by 

the peculiarities of a specific medium so much as from the work of 

appropriation and dismantling performed in the subordinate regions. 

Reproduced (counter to the ideal of originality that was there at its 

outset), differentiated and subdued (beyond its proclamations of 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

rupture and of permanent updating), converted into a personal 

resource (outside the framework of collective programs and 

tendencies), the beginnings of the avant-garde movements as much as 

their strategies end up being profoundly adulterated. For example, if 

we return to the above-mentioned scheme: of the major directions 

latent in Postimpressionism, the Paraguayan artists take, with much 

delay, only the two that will afterwards be the foundation of the 

modernist breakaway: that direction which privileged the formal 

organization of the work and that which insisted on its expressive 

intensity. The third, that which will end in Surrealism, is ignored for 

now. And that happens simply because it is not of much use: a poetic 

challenging of the rationalist myth has little to do in Paraguay. Excess 

rationality was never a serious problem in these lands: what Octavio 

Paz claimed, referring to superficial Latin American romanticism, is 

valid here: “The artists could not rebel against something they had 

never suffered: the tyranny of reason.”5 

During the period of “transition towards modernity” (the 1930s and 

1940s) the phenomenon in which a name represented a moment 

occurred once more. And so, each one of the above-mentioned 

directions is summed up in the work of one artist. Through solid 

forms and a schematized and assured composition, Jaime Bestard 

takes charge of the formalist moment, while Wolf Bandurek (Figure 3) 

[TS – Figure 3 near here] assumes the historical task of laying the 

foundations of expressive content by means of a vehement and 

tormented figuration: the Postimpressionist (pre-avant-garde) cycle is 

closed and is referred to the following moment. 

Dramatic and, at the same time, firmly structured, the works of 

Andrés Guevara and Ofelia Echagüe could be interpreted as a 

synthesis between these two moments (Figure 4). [TS – Figure 4 near 

here] But whether because it was developed outside the country 

(Argentina and Brazil)—in the case of the former—or whether because 

it grew up withdrawn into itself and had few links with local 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

production—in the case of Echagüe Vega—neither of them produced 

any continuity or generated a process. Thus, the particular 

Expressionism of Bandurek and the formalism peculiar to Bestard 

(Figure 5) [TS – Figure 5 near here] will only be superseded from the 

work of the Grupo Arte Nuevo onwards, though the out-of-place 

precedent represented by the works of Guevara and Echagüe Vega 

cannot have been unknown. 

[b]Arte Nuevo 

Formed by Olga Blinder (Figure 6), [TS – Figure 6 near here] Lilí del 

Mónaco, José Laterza Parodi, and Josefina Plá, the Grupo Arte Nuevo 

is created in 1954, and is the first of the avant-garde movements to 

present certain features of its own: it emerges with explicit intentions 

of breaking away and brings together a collective around a basic 

ideology defined as “modern” (the series of exhibitions shown by the 

group, which is later joined by artists such as Edith Jiménez (Figure  

7), [TS – Figure 7 near here] Leonor Cecotto, and Hermann Guggiari, 

is called Primera Semana de Arte Moderno Paraguayo (First Week of 

Modern Paraguayan Art), in undoubted allusion to the distant 

Brazilian experience). But the movement is prepared to sacrifice other 

features of modernity to the exigencies of its own tempo: the artists 

take the resources and arguments of tendencies which they adapt to 

the “necessities of the medium” independently of the validity that 

these have in the (sub)metropoles (the model of the Primera Semana in 

São Paolo was already 32 years old). 

What are those necessities of the medium? Based in this case on the 

dichotomous model of modernity, the group understands that the 

tension between the autonomy of the language and the force of the 

expression constitutes the central question to be confronted. Josefina 

Plá, the theorist of the movement, states it plainly and categorically: 

“What unifies the artists . . . is their sincere anxiety to renew, in 

parallel with the form, the content of Paraguayan painting . . .”6 It was 

already claimed that this anxiety was one of the great motives of 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

modern art. Now the novice modernity must conciliate its terms 

however it can. It does so by remembering simultaneously the lessons 

of Bestard and the experience of Bandurek: it resorts as much to a 

controlled constructive and geometrizing organization as to a 

passionate distortion of expressionist origin. Arriving opportunely 

from São Paolo in 1956, Livio Abramo brings his own model of 

synthesis between the severe order of the form and the productive 

confusion of historical content. 

The result of the complex appropriation of the 1950s is a figuration 

firmly underpinned in its construction and emphasized in its dramatic 

meanings: a sort of “cubistized” Expressionism. Or rather, crystallized, 

given that Cubism, invoked then as a reference, is reinterpreted so 

liberally that it maintains little of its original meaning. In reality, just 

as has been said about surrealism, Cubism did not have any mission 

to accomplish in the plastic arts of Paraguay: it was not confronting a 

well-affirmed naturalist representation whose spaces it had to disarm; 

it was seeking only to give solidity to the new forms and to establish 

principles of order, to constitute—it is worth mentioning—that useful 

moment of structural clarification of the modern Latin American 

image, which, in the words of Juan Acha, represents a “salutary 

corrective,” which Frederico Morais qualifies as a “period of cleaning 

and disinfection” and Tarsila do Amaral understands as an “obligatory 

military service.”7 

Before finishing this point, it is appropriate to explain here certain 

conditioning factors affecting the flexibility of the new peripheral 

avant-gardes in adapting themselves freely to different situations and 

comfortably adulterating the central models. Modern art grew up in 

Paraguay as a marginal and minority practice, isolated from the rest of 

Latin America, away from the great cultural majorities, ignored by the 

middle classes, who did not see in its forms sources of utility or 

elements of prestige, and on the sidelines of any official interest. These 

conditions certainly impeded any type of support and encouragement 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

for its manifestations and had a negative effect on the professional 

training of the artists and their international reputation. But, on the 

other hand, they constituted a certain guarantee against the 

intervention of an authoritarian State and the maneuvers of an 

ignorant and presumptuous middle class. 

[b]The Cosmopolitans 

[tx]The abstraction with which the 1960s duly begins institutes a new 

purge of the image: another historical rite of “cleaning and 

disinfection”; another necessary moment for the modernizing evolution 

in operation. On the one hand, it enables the underpinning of the 

process of updating demanded by this stage: it is connected to the 

movement of internationalization begun in Latin America in the 

previous decade and, paradoxically, bestows a certain family air on 

Latin American art. On the other, free of thematisms and figurative 

rhetorics which compromise the sovereignty of the form, abstraction 

underpins another basic modern conquest: the autonomy of the 

aesthetic. Artists such as Edith Jiménez, Carlos Colombino, Lotte 

Shulz, Laura Márquez, and Michael Burt, among others, successively 

purify the image until they reach a non-figuration that oscillates 

between organic and geometric tendencies and results in the material 

informalism of Fernando Grillón, Alberto Miltos, and Ricardo Yustman 

and, later, in the op art and kinetic image of Enrique Careaga (Figure 

8). [TS – Figure 8 near here] 

[txt]It is clear, from what has been shown, that the abstract artists 

work immersed in the historical logic of modernity, but they do so in a 

dispersed form and on the margin of clear programs; without the aim 

of registering their works historically. The second tendency formally 

instituted in an organic group and following an avant-garde 

proclamation appears in the middle of the 1960s. The name of the 

group, Los Novísimos, clearly denotes their zeal for renewal and their 

affinities with the expansive cosmopolitist front that was then 

advancing across the map of Latin America. But, paradoxically, the 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

group Los Novísimos (formed by Enrique Careaga, José Pratt, William 

Riquelme, and Angel Yegros) acted more as proclaimers than as 

executors of avant-garde actions (Figure 9). [TS – Figure 9 near here] 

Another imbalance can be detected here between the exemplary avant-

gardes and their disturbed Paraguayan versions; the local avant-garde 

drives occurred in a dissociated and unfocused form, according to the 

particular interests of the artists or the programs of the group. In 

effect, beyond their impassioned revolutionary slogans, the concrete 

proposal of the group Los Novísimos consisted of a readaptation of 

action painting and neofiguration, while the “experimentalists” such as 

Ricardo Migliorisi (Figure 10), [TS – Figure 10 near here] Bernardo 

Krasniansky, and Laura Márquez, who presented daring happenings 

and mounted disconcerting environments, acted on the margin of any 

ideology or body of proposals. On the other hand, the group Los 

Novísimos lasted very little time; immediately some of their 

representatives passed into the ranks of more radical 

experimentalism. The latter were formed by artists who, through the 

influence of the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires (1964–8), startled 

the provincial atmosphere of Asunción with the audacious acrobatics 

of a hasty and somewhat banal experimentalism. Banal but 

necessary: it accomplished the function of shaking an overly prudish 

sensibility in order to include aspects which, with the opening up of 

international awareness, brought the winds of the time. 

It has already been said that the group Arte Nuevo, like the artistic 

production of the 1950s in general, had felt responsible for resolving 

the antagonism created between the clarity of the artistic language 

and the confused pressure of the historical content. The following 

moment—which now comes under consideration and which coincides, 

approximately, with the decade of the 1960s—has as its mission to 

confront another modern disjunction: the opposition between the 

particular and the universal: how to be faithful to contemporaneity 

without betraying the particular experience and its own history. We 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

already know that in a modern register this question is solved 

dialectically: the central–peripheral poles (or hegemonic–subordinate, 

dominant–dependent, etc.) constitute terms of a process that advances 

by feeding on its own tensions: Latin American art is the result of a 

synthesis between the local and the international. Nevertheless, the 

role of the dependent avant-garde movements is to appropriate the 

metropolitan innovations in order to adapt them to the requirements 

of their own history. But Paraguayan history itself was profoundly 

marked at this moment by the dictatorship of Stroessner. In this way, 

the local–international opposition once more coincides with the need 

to express a period that is too intense; that is, it ends up being 

connected to the form–content disjunction, although the reasons do 

not fit together so easily and its edges do not overlap neatly. 

[b]Utopias 

[tx]To explain further, at this moment Paraguayan art is faced with 

one of the great modern themes, namely, that relating to the utopian 

perspective of artistic creation and the emancipatory commitment of 

its practice. The art grows in spite of the dictatorship and, partly, in 

opposition to it. The modern “commitment to history,” which seals a 

moment in the task of the avant-garde, is related here to the 

inescapable anti-dictatorial position. Although some artists, like Olga 

Blinder and Carlos Colombino (Figure 11), [TS – Figure 11 near here] 

dare to denounce the outrages of the system directly, in general the 

references at this time require the creation of a particular rhetoric, full 

of suggestions, of course, and driven by an insistent truth. Many 

artists develop a strong critique of the military authoritarianism but 

they do so obliquely, through powerful metaphors, obscure ciphers, 

allusions that constantly mobilize the language and force it into 

ingenious, at times desperate, games. 

[txt]But the obscure maneuvers of metaphor not only allowed the 

dissimulation of critical discourse and transgressive desire; by means 

of its evasions and veils, its semblances and silences, they also 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

contributed to questioning in the code of representation the legitimacy 

of a vertical order and a unique meaning. That is, they promoted 

critical, non-denunciatory rhetoric. In this sense, perhaps without 

intending to, the art offered its best anti-dictatorial arguments: out of 

its deviations it helped to unnumb dulled sensibilities; through its 

deflected focuses, to suggest the conflicts concealed by the militarist 

myths. Myths that invoke the “National Being” as the foundation of an 

essential identity and expel all difference considered threatening. In 

this direction, and not always consciously, certain improvised 

“vanguards of the South” could fulfill a role which, if not 

revolutionary, was at least critical and protesting. 

[b]Ripe Times 

[tx]The anxiety to be up to date at all costs placated, the 1970s recover 

the temperate tone. It is a very different moment, marked by an 

unusual process of economic growth8 which permits, for the first time, 

the consolidation of an art market and the investment of the artist 

with a certain social prestige. Even though art continues to be scorned 

by the government and developed at the margin of any official interest 

and of an efficient system of middle-class patronage, it now has 

discrete commercial circuits that increase its production and the 

professionalization of more than a few agents of its own. Equipped 

with the institutional recognition that the market signifies, matured 

by two decades of intense development, and faced with the necessity 

of adjusting forms that had been born late and grown in a hurry, 

Paraguayan art during the seventies and part of the eighties acquires 

a more conservative tone (on a formal level) and a clearly reflective 

direction. 

[txt]Paradoxically, however, the 1970s had begun with a movement 

played at the other extreme of reflection and oriented in the opposite 

direction to that of the linguistic purges of the two previous decades 

(the “cubistization” of the 1950s and the abstraction of the 1960s). 

Although outlined during the last years of the previous decade, the 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

eruption of the so-called “fantastic figuration” coincides exactly with 

the direction of the seventies. The design of Jenaro Pindú, Ricardo 

Yustman, Selmo Martínez, Luis Alberto Boh, and, later, Miguel Heyn 

clears away ominous climates loaded with delirium, deviation, and 

menace: the fateful ciphers of a time that could not be revealed. 

Obviously, the antithesis this tendency marks in respect of the 

reflective direction, which had already been incubated and will now 

emerge, betrays a secret link between the two movements and allows 

interpretation of the disorder of this fantasy design as the necessary 

and obscure obverse of the wise reflections of the language upon itself. 

This moment seeks to exorcize the monsters remaining from the 

previous scene in order to prepare the following one. But the latter, as 

we shall see, will not be able to evade the nightmares lying in wait for 

a continuing history. 

The analytical tendencies, linked to metropolitan conceptual art, now 

begin to be profiled. The appropriation carried out by the Paraguayan 

artists of certain resources of the conceptual avant-gardes (the latter 

in the strict sense) is interesting since it implies once again the 

adulteration of the metropolitan models. It is known that the 

analytical option, an opportune term suggested by Menna,9 erupts like 

one of the most solid forces that define the horizon at that moment. 

The great cycle of artistic modernity closes with great self-reflection 

that highlights its own rhetorical mechanisms and equips itself with 

aseptic fields of language. Reality is observed, with a lack of 

confidence, from the peephole of concepts, the ultimate principle of 

representation: so much so that the idea of the work ends up 

displacing its execution. This self-reflective tendency, proclaimer of 

postmodern criticism, which is already prepared and will make its 

entrance immediately after, appears in Paraguay in the first years of 

the seventies. But in doing so, it becomes refracted, unfocused, 

contaminated with the pressing contents of a dramatic time, forgets 

its tautological proclamations, escapes from the pure, self-conscious 

circle of the language and, at times, is dissolved by the muddy current 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

of history. A history certainly more preoccupied by its own 

misfortunes than by the intimate mechanism of the codes or the 

specular play that enables the manipulation of the signs. 

Developed in Asunción by artists such as Carlos Colombino, Osvaldo 

Salerno (Figures 12 and 13), [TS – Figures 12 and 13 near here] 

Bernardo Krasniansky, and Luis Alberto Boh, this tendency is known 

as “Re-figuration” and arises midway between the seclusion of 

aesthetic forms and the claims of the historical drama. This is because 

this reflection of the language on itself did not occur in Paraguay to 

the detriment of the image strongly committed to expression. Thus, 

although reflective and formalized, the peculiar Paraguayan version 

surpasses the aseptic schemes of the concept and embraces a dense 

and very solid figuration: the “Re-figuration” serves not only to 

consolidate the significant frame of the work but also to accommodate 

profuse social content, connect with the figurative tradition of an 

expressive stamp, pass furtive messages, metaphorize oppression, and 

evade censorship. But, above all, to announce the possibility of 

different perspectives of enunciation, the existence of other margins of 

inscription. 

The task of disembedding a syntax run in a closed circuit and opening 

it to the inclemencies of a climate that presses from outside helped to 

overcome the not inconsiderable risks of conceptual narcissism of that 

moment. But also, and at the other extreme, it allowed a denunciatory 

and pamphleteering sense of the critique to be avoided. This 

unfocused manner of working the language could, in this way, often 

avoid the contentism of the motif as much as the self-sufficiency of the 

form consumed, something which marked a primordial achievement 

in terms of the modern Paraguayan program. Thus, following its own 

paths, the image, simultaneously reflective and dramatic at this 

moment, is presented as surmounting the conflicts that disturbed and 

mobilized the difficult course of artistic modernity in Paraguay. In the 

first place, it builds a bridge between the serene kingdom of language 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

and the turbulent fields of history; in the second, it proposes a 

convincing model of mediation between the need to tune to the 

international timetable and that of following the rhythm of its own 

circumstances. In this way, this moment is considered the most 

intense and prolific in Paraguayan plastic arts, in which they reach 

the culmination of their process of modernity. 

But that same idea of time completed and consumed, so dear to 

modern thought, has a different scope in peripheral cultures from that 

which it possesses in the center. With reference to the latter it seems 

inappropriate to suppose a model realized, and to the former the idea 

of a synthesis that satisfies differences, of a circle that is closed, 

spent, and satisfied, is unthinkable. Thus, although one may talk of a 

different time in order to name its passing immediately after 

overthrowing the ferocious military tyranny, many questions, 

surviving and dispersed, will continue to fill the postmodern air with 

ghosts. Here too a modern illusion is woven. And a short breach is 

opened. 

[a]II. De-Modernities 

[b]The Slips of the Transition 

[tx]On February 3, 1989, in the early morning, the dictatorship of 

Stroessner fell, pushed by former accomplices of his who had been 

able to smell the new air of their time. Officially, the period of the so-

called Transition to Democracy begins then, which corresponds with 

the ambiguous time of the post-dictatorships in South America and 

coincides, in exact date, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 

melancholy post-historic rituals. The moment known as that of the 

post-dictatorial transitions in the Southern Cone elapses in a passing 

place; a “displace” which, by its own provisional definition, is 

transitory: a “mistime”. And it does so immersed in a new atmosphere, 

supplied with lights less crude and scenes not as dramatic. A climate 

that is confused with that of the clouded postmodern landscape. 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

[txt]But the fiction of a time suspended and temperate—a fiction 

associated with the fall of the military dictatorships and in tune with 

the innocuous global present—could not last too long. Soon the 

neutral postmodern horizon was clouded with the return of unburied 

ghosts and the shadow of new threats and, very soon, the “post-

democracies” of the South allowed glimpses of the effects of new 

corruptions, violence, and serious disruptions linked with brutal 

processes of transnational neo-liberalization. The ever more serious 

environmental, political, economic, and social crises that shook the 

countries of the South during that agitated end of century are 

reconciled with difficulty with the lightweight models and the 

apathetic airs that surround globalized culture. The pressures of their 

own histories, which increased, no doubt, with universal events, once 

more adulterated the meaning of certain central paradigms. 

Moreiras finds in the post-dictatorial situation of Chile, Argentina, 

Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay the prototype of the postmodern 

cultural impasse. That is, the Southern Cone well represents the 

postmodern paradox, according to which certain peripheries, 

heterogeneous in their modes of production and relatively resistant to 

the fetishization of the world as merchandise, have greater 

possibilities than the center of keeping alive the sense of a channel of 

history. In the context of a general weakening of the historical sense, 

overwhelmed to the end by the symbolic power of transnational 

capitalism, “the possibility of historicity would, nevertheless, be less 

exhausted on the periphery than that which is in the center.”10 

That adulteration of the central paradigms of postmodernity, 

increased no doubt by this different position on the construction of 

history, provoked a new slide in the production of some Latin 

American art, driven more by the pressures of their difficult time than 

by the bland seductions of transnational imageries. Already during the 

1980s in the Southern Cone, some tendencies in contemporary art 

began to attempt new forms of dissidence again and to recover, 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

nevertheless, their diminished political commitment and their 

weakened argumentative vocation. 

But as much to oppose the indulgent globalized images, it is worth 

comparing these critical tendencies in the art of the Southern Cone in 

the eighties and nineties with equivalent, contemporary directions 

developed in the metropoles, especially the different models of activist, 

political, or alternative art produced in New York: the most defined 

and influential proposals and the best supported theoretically. These 

are centered basically on the obsessive questioning of the system of 

art itself (institutionality of museums, galleries, curatorships, 

publications, criticism), the emergence of new identities (ethnic, racial, 

sexual, cultural) and certain locations of (micro)power (sexuality, 

gender, body). Correspondingly, the peripheries inherit these 

preoccupations but, in doing so, they again displace them; they re-

send them to other places. They convert them into an obsession with 

the tortured or disappeared body; they link them with the theme of 

the construction of memory and the reconstruction of the public; they 

confront them with discussions about the relation of center–periphery, 

global–local; they involve them in the horrors of hunger and violence, 

in the necessity to re-imagine utopias in contrast to an unfortunate 

present. 

Once more, certain questions that are well formulated at the center 

lose definition once resituated in marginal zones. In this way, the self-

questioning of the system of art does not signify the same for regions 

lacking a well-established institutionality in this sphere: an 

institutionality partly necessary, or at least demanded by the most 

critical sectors. Thus, the protest positions of the South, more than 

against an institutionality of art lacking in strength and prestige—

incapable of constituting itself in hegemonic counter-pole—orient their 

forces against the mediocre aestheticism propagated by the global 

markets and, even against certain stereotypes of the art of the 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

mainstream (the politically correct, the multiculturalist cliché, the 

exoticist readings of Latin American art, etc.). 

Also the theme of the politics of difference functions differently in the 

North and the South. The South American art of the eighties happily 

makes space for “alternative” figures and images, but soon recognizes 

that, translated into a different artistic practice, against a background 

of complex historical experiences relative to the theme of the 

ethnographic, the pluricultural, and the multiethnic, “the policies of 

identity” end up being, at best, forced. And even more: it warns that, 

posed in multiculturalist code, such policies tend to substantialize the 

differences, atomize sectorial demands, and hinder the possibility that 

these are articulated in group projects. The slogan appeared, 

therefore, to introduce the theme of difference but to do so facing a 

certain common range of meaning that might facilitate a social 

construction: to think of the diverse as closer to the figure of 

citizenship than to that of identity. This is because, during the post-

dictatorship, as much as or more than the respect for difference, 

social cohesion was presented as a basic requirement for a region 

faced with the exigency of laboriously recomposing its worn social 

scheme and attempting shared projects. 

[b]The Return 

[tx]In Paraguay, these critical directions hatched suddenly, once the 

nineties had already begun, immediately after a brief, suffocating 

situation of stagnation. Around the middle of the 1980s, in effect, the 

creative tension that was driving the activity of the plastic arts had 

begun to lose impetus. Certain great names were being repeated, and 

it became impossible to discern the prospect of the arrival of changes 

or, at least, generational reinforcements. It seemed as if, with the 

culmination of the modern experience, the artists had not completed 

recognition of their new functions and places. As has been indicated, 

this situation of uncertainty and paralysis coincided with the lack of 

appetite of the postmodern atmosphere and, from 1989, was linked to 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

the stage of post-dictatorship. A stage awaited with delayed anxieties; 

a moment of flaming liberties. But also a time of new 

disenchantments. Soon after the fall of the dictatorship, the presence 

of artistic and cultural sectors began to fade; they lost drive and 

enthusiasm and softened their gaze. This was because positions were 

then no longer so definite nor certainties so clear. The space in which 

power is played, traditional field of heroic battles, became a confused 

scenario of multiple actors and unstable positions. 

[txt]This ambiguous diversity acted as a propitious agent for the 

affirmation of the difference and complexity of social forces but, as has 

been said, it also became a factor that dissolved collective identities 

and certainties. This was because, although the dictatorship of 

Stroessner had managed to impede the constitution of a firm social 

fabric, the resistance to the system constituted a strong utopian 

reference point around which diverse sectors of civil society were allied 

and against which many artists fervently constructed their metaphors. 

Thus, the dramatic script of the dictatorship was succeeded by a 

confused and unfocused libretto. Disorientated, the artists needed to 

reformulate their positions and adapt themselves to an unknown 

script, a choreography created in the theater without markers or 

contrasts. At that point, that soft and deflated moment for the culture 

occurred: the hoped-for transition was experienced more as a loss of 

reference points than as a restorative stimulus of historical meaning. 

Against this anemic background the emergence of new forces began to 

show itself from the early years of the nineties. Alongside artists who 

had already produced a significant body of work, such as Carlos 

Colombino, Osvaldo Salerno, Ricardo Migliorisi, Bernardo 

Krasniansky, and Félix Toranzos (Figure 14), [TS – Figure 14 near 

here] other new names appear, not always so young, such as Fátima 

Martini, Karina Yaluk, Carlo Spatuzza (Figure 15), [TS – Figure 15 

near here] Engelberto Giménez, Marité Zaldívar (Figure 16), [TS – 

Figure 16 near here] Mónica González, Feliciano Centurión, Alejandra 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

García, Marcos Benítez (Figure 17), [TS – Figure 17 near here] Gustavo 

Benítez, Pedro Barrail, and Adriana González, among others. And 

afterwards, the last batch formed by very young artists such as 

Claudia Casarino, Fredi Casco, Bettina Brizuela, Marcelo Medina, and 

others. From different places and across distinct and mixed media, all 

of them aim at a critical reassessment of representation and attempt 

new treatments of the public–private relationship and new registers of 

the historical gaze. In this search they meet names from disciplines 

that, until then, were operating separately and that now exchange 

positions and share places; names that come from previous decades, 

like that of Jesús Ruiz Nestosa, or that are defined during this time, 

such as, among others, those of Jorge Sáenz, Juan Britos, Carlos 

Bittar, Gabriela Zuccolillo (photography), as well as those of Paz 

Encina, Tana Schémbori, and Juan Carlos Maneglia (video). 

In different degrees and with disparate scope, these artists adopt the 

rhetorical strategies of the international art of the eighties and 

nineties (the conceptual anestheticism, the emphasis of the narrative 

and discursive dimension, the allegorical resources, the 

intertextuality, the technological hybridity) and they appropriate its 

basic themes (the media culture, the anthropological dimension, the 

repositioning of subjectivity and memory, etc.). But in the best cases, 

those resources and these themes are brought to a parallel scene 

where they are forced to deal with local or global problems linked to 

their own experience. Perhaps the return of extra-aesthetic content 

implies a reaction against excessive modern formalism. But it is 

indubitable that it also signifies a reply to the unbearable lightness of 

postmodern aestheticism: the eagerness to return to scrutinize, 

uselessly, the real; to adopt positions, perhaps transitory, faced with 

the intricate tasks that history proposes and to anticipate sustainable 

futures from them. 

[a]III. Parallel Modernities 

[b]Shortcuts 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

[tx]Up to now, we have been analyzing the imbalance operating 

between the metropolitan modernities and their peripheral versions; a 

differentiation exploited by the latter in order to twist the original 

meaning indicated by the former or to attempt to reinvigorate it or to 

supplant it when it was exhausted. But now we find ourselves facing 

another case. That of subjects which, without offending too much the 

language or the concept, could be called “sub-peripheral.” They are 

popular, suburban, and indigenous sectors, communities, or 

individualities that do not pretend to imitate or construct particular 

versions of European–North American signals but to pursue their own 

historical paths, generally of traditional origin (colonial or pre-

Hispanic), and naturally to assume that the obscure reasons of the 

time brought them, each time with greater frequency, to penetrate into 

territories ruled by modern codes (economic, social, cultural, aesthetic 

codes). That is, these collectives or these persons do not reveal a 

preoccupation with being modern, nor an anxiety to preserve 

“authenticity.” Nor do they fear adopting, sometimes with great 

rapidity and almost always with self-confidence, modern models when 

they are convenient for expressive or functional requirements. Nor are 

they uncomfortable with obstinately maintaining archaic forms when 

these retain validity. No mention is made here, since they are very well 

known and irrelevant in this instance, of the cases of mutilation, 

devastation, and coercive imposition of cultural forms, as well as 

those concerning the preservation, more or less uncontaminated, of 

the traditional models; this point refers exclusively to the processes 

through which certain modern forms are filtered and redefined from 

continuing practices of histories outside modern experience. 

[txt]These impure processes perhaps constitute the most 

characteristic expressions of what comes to be called “cultural 

hybridity” in order to designate certain notes of intermixed 

postmodern globalization. But although coincidences and 

intersections between the popular11 and the postmodern imageries 

exist, it would be extravagant to talk about a “popular postmodernity”: 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

if, on its own, each term is problematic, together they would comprise 

an unnecessarily complicated concept and, as such, one that is of 

little use. It seems improper to apply categories arising from a 

saturation of modernity to cultures governed by traditional symbolic 

systems, amodern modalities, and mixed, fractured, and incomplete 

experiences of modern times. 

The daring seizure that certain popular sectors carry out of the 

complex iconography of modernity does not imply adherence to the 

modern program, nor, much less, affiliation to avant-garde principles 

or recognition of the autonomy of the aesthetic. The popular artists do 

not conceive their productions as sequences of a linearly ordered 

history: they take the necessary figures directly and insert them in the 

course of a different path, their own, and at the level of different times. 

Pressurized by new conditions that compromise its survival, those 

cultures develop different symbolic strategies of appropriation of 

images, techniques, and modern codes, and even contest circuits 

particular to modern institutionality (on the level of art: market, 

publications, distinctions, participation in international competitions 

and events, etc.). Contrary to discriminations and preconceptions that 

seek to reduce popular expressions to banal folkloric productions, 

examples of ethnographic (if not archaeological) collections, petrified 

national essences, or curious residues of a world in extinction; 

contrary to these prejudices, of strong ideological sign, many popular 

artists, integrated or not in communities or sectors, re-create and re-

accommodate the scenarios of their production, and even try to widen 

them, competing with the learned sectors and even with industrialized 

culture. 

[b]The Four Scenarios 

[tx]Continuing in the direction of taking examples from the culture of 

Paraguay, brief mention is made of some particular situations, 

produced in four different scenarios. The first of these concerns the 

specific modernity of certain urban or suburban artists whose 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

sensibilities are to be found forged in popular matrixes, even though 

their works come to be circulated in learned institutions of art. The 

most significant case is that of the work of Ignacio Núñez Soler (Figure 

18), [TS – Figure 18 near here] which has been produced without any 

contact with the development of artistic modernization, although it 

anticipated many of its consequences in a parallel and separate scene. 

Like other painters (Juan Bautista Rojas, Carlos Reyes, or, more 

recently, Benjazmín Ocampos), he is linked to the modern desire to 

follow shortcuts of his own, and naturally mixes different contents 

and linguistic repertoires of the avant-garde movements and the 

culture of the masses; without major procedures, he jumps directly 

from his iconographic quagmire of references to formal and expressive 

triumphs which enlightened modernists achieve by means of long and 

laborious processes. 

[txt]In the second scenario, indigenous artists incorporate techniques, 

images, and modern usages either to replace their diminished 

iconographies or to oxygenate them with new reinforcements or, 

directly, to explore alternative survivalist sources. For example, 

certain Avá-Guaraní and Nivaklé groups compete with design, 

producing sculptural forms intended for utilitarian functions foreign 

to their daily life (Figure 19), [TS – Figure 19 near here] just as Mak’a 

communities invest in the urban market, substituting synthetic 

materials for vegetable fibers, and Ishir populations create for sale 

strange baskets, intruders in their history but connected, no doubt, 

with their exalted aesthetic. One particular case is that of Ogwa, an 

indigenous Ishir-Chamacoco who has invented for the delight of 

ethnographers and benefit of the galleries of Asunción, beguiling and 

assured drawings, teeming with gods, shamans, and nameless beasts, 

which dialog with the febrile neo-baroque imagery of some of the 

learned artists. 

In the third scenario are represented rites based on obscure 

indigenous-Catholic syncretisms that are firmly rooted in certain 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

peasant communities. Offered to the patron saint of the community, 

these profane religious festivals preserve the formulas of the 

traditional libretto as much as they are open to the dramatization of 

strictly contemporary events of the present day. The most illustrative 

case is that of the festival of the patron saints Peter and Paul which 

takes place in Altos, and whose tangled scenic structure obsessively 

preserves the narrative nucleus of the ancient ritual: the archaic 

dispute around the mastery of fire and the mythical rape of primitive 

women by the historical adversaries of the indigenous Guaraní, the 

ferocious Guaykurú. Those who personify them attack, dressed up in 

rustling costumes of dried leaves and, like many of the characters who 

appear in the scene, with their faces hidden by masks of wood or 

cloth. Around this fixed kernel of the storyline, which begins to 

develop after liturgical worship, a delirious succession of 

performances occurs, referring to events of burning local, national, or 

global significance: peasant demands, cases of public corruption, 

political or social scandals, elections of queens, disputes between 

neighbors, fashion parades, or international conflicts, represented in a 

mood of parody and tone of media spectacle with impeccable scenic 

effects. To the sequence of the mass, the fervent worship, the obscure 

rite, and the theatrical extravaganza is added the popular expression 

of jubilation: the dance which rounds off the festival and greets the 

peasant dawn with polkas sung in Guaraní and monotonous tropical 

rhythms. 

The last scenario is intersected by the experience of rural artist–

artisans whose work invades modern territories without deviating 

from the path of indigenous and Mestiza tradition. I take the case of 

two peasant ceramists who look out onto the scene of contemporary 

plastic arts from the threshold of their pre-capitalist world and over 

the intact foundation of their own memories. In November 1994, 

Juana Marta Rodas and her daughter Julia Isídrez, resident potters of 

the Caaguasú company in the village of Itá, received from the 

international jury the most important prize for the plastic arts that 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

was then awarded in the country (Gran Premio de la Bienal Martel de 

Artes Visuales). From pre-colonial times it was the mothers who 

transmitted to their daughters the secrets of ceramics, a craft which, 

since then, has survived the impact of different adversities, preserving 

the original alchemy of the technique and the sure outline of its forms. 

But although well secured to the foundations of this tradition, the 

images of these ceramists unexpectedly acknowledge the challenge of 

new influences, of distinct functions, of other airs of their own time. 

Well then, what do they have to do with Mestiza history and the 

tradition of earthenware, these capricious pieces, these dramatic 

sculptures that appear to respond more to the deliriums of an urban 

artist than to the serene invention produced in the fields? It is 

unquestionable that these artist–artisans continue naming a territory 

that already produced forms in clay long before the Colony. But 

likewise it is obvious that they express a definitively different sphere, a 

space into which have filtered other perceptions and other ways of 

seeing the same landscape, which is already no longer the same. 

These disturbing sculptures demonstrate that, considered in 

themselves, neither tradition nor modernity offers guarantees, nor do 

they constitute threats; what legitimizes the symbols that the one or 

the other produces is the truth that feeds them both. And the truth of 

Juana Marta and of Julia is that of an ambiguous time and a torn 

present. The labour of expressing it fully supposes an intense effort 

and requires secure, solid forms, figures that are further behind the 

origin and above the barrier traced by the modern threshold. 

These stubborn, difficult to catalog desires proliferate in different 

places in Latin American cultures. They operate at different levels of a 

blurred spectrum that moves between the popular and the modern (or 

the global and the massive) sliding from form to form along an 

indeterminable range of positions and behind a dream restored a 

thousand times. In these confused tasks are to be found some of the 

strongest arguments of the difference in the indefinite terrains of Latin 

American art. 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

[a]Notes 

[nt]1. During the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70) waged by 

Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against Paraguay, newspapers 

were published on the battlefronts, such as the Cabichuí (“wasp” 

in Guaraní) and El Centinela, profusely illustrated by wood 

engravings made by the soldiers. These expressions constitute a 

significant example of Latin American popular art. 

[nt]2. This article was written in 1998. 

[nt]3. Eduardo Subirats, Linterna mágica. Vanguardia, media y cultura 

tardomoderna, Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 1997, p. 14. 

[nt]4. On the one hand, Paraguayan culture suffered a long tradition 

of enclaustration which was broken just after the fall of the 

dictatorship of Stroessner; on the other, it bears the weight of a 

double hegemonic mediation: at least during the modern 

moment in the strict sense that it received metropolitan 

paradigms through the regional submetropoles of, first, Buenos 

Aires and, then, São Paolo. 

[nt]5. Octavio Paz, “Palabras al simposio de Austin, Texas,” in Damián 

Bayón, El artista latinoamericano y su identidad, Caracas: Monte 

Avila, 1977, p. 23. 

[nt]6. Josefina Plá, “Movimiento renovador en nuestra pintura,” La 

Tribuna newspaper, Asunción, 11.04.1954. 

[nt]7. Frederico Morais, Artes plásticas na América Latina: do trance ao 

transitorio, Río de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1979, p. 90. 

[nt]8. The flow of capital resulting from the accelerated 

internationalization of the Paraguayan economy, the 

hydroelectric project at Itaipú, and the investments of 

multinational companies, many of them based on the unbridled 

corruption promoted by the Stroessner oligarchy, prompted the 

sudden reactivation of the national economy during the decade 

of the seventies. 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

[nt]9. Filiberto Menna, La opción analítica en el arte moderno. Figuras 

e íconos, Colección Punto y Línea, Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo 

Gili S.A., 1977. 

[nt]10. Alberto Moreiras, “Posdictadura y reforma del 

pensamiento,” in Revista de Crítica Cultural, no. 7, Santiago de 

Chile, November 1993. 

[nt]11. With reservations, the term “popular” is used here as an 

essential reference and for practical reasons located on the 

margin of any discussion regarding its relevance. In this article, 

“popular” is understood as the whole group of great majorities 

or minority sectors excluded from an effective participation in 

the social, economic, cultural, and/or political and self-affirmed 

in its difference through a symbolic production alternative to the 

hegemonic cultural models. 

[TS – captions] 

[fig]Figure 1 

Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, 17th century, Franciscan 

Workshop, Caazapa, Collection Museo del Barro. 

[fig]Figure 2 

Cabichui. Periodical published during the War of the Triple Alliance, 

1967, Collection Museo del Barro, Paraguay. 

[fig]Figure 3 

Wolf Bandureck, Storm, oil on canvas, c 1940. Private Collection 

[fig]Figure 4 

Ofelia Echagüe, Untitled, oil on canvas, 1952. Collection Museo del 

Barro. Paraguay. 

[fig]Figure 5 

Jaime Bestard, Untitled, not dated. Private Collection. 

[fig]Figure 6 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

Olga Blinder, Still Life, oil on canvas, 1953. Private Collection. 

[fig]Figure 7 

Edith Jimenez, Flowers, oil on canvas, 1954. Private Collection. 

[fig]Figure 8 

Enrique Careaga, Propuesta luminico cinetica para una partida de ping 

pong (Proposal for light kinetics for a ping-pong match), 1969 

[fig]Figure 9 

Angel Yegros, Icon A, 1966. Collection Museo del Barro, Paraguay. 

[fig]Figure 10 

Ricardo Milgliorisi, El Banquete Inconcluso (The unfinished banquet), 

2000. Collection Fundación Migliorisi. 

[fig]Figure 11 

Carlos Colombino, E.T. Serie. Reflexiones sobre Durero (Reflections on 

Dürer), 1980. Collection Museo del Barro. Paraguay 

[fig]Figure 12 

Osvaldo, Composition Impression, 1974, Collection Museo del Barro, 

Paraguay. 

[fig]Figure 13 

Osvaldo Salerno, La Pileta (The pool), installation, 1997, Collection of 

the Artist. 

[fig]Figure 14 

Felix Toranzos. Sueños robados (Stolen Dreams), installation, 1998. 

Collection Carlos Colombino. 

[fig]Figure 15 

Carlo Spatuzza, Corazonada, 1997–2002, Collection of the artist. 

[fig]Figure 16 



Art in Translation, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 87–114 

Marite Zaldivar, Estampas patrias (native prints), installation, 1995. 

Collection of the artist. 

[fig]Figure 17 

Marcos Benitez, Hacer y desahacer la vida cotidiana (Doing and 

undoing everyday life), installation, 1999. Collection Museo del Barro. 

Paraguay 

[fig]Figure 18 

Ignacio Nuñez Soler, Corrida de toros en 1906 (Bullfight in 1906), oil 

on canvas, 1980. Collection Museo del Barro, Paraguay. 

[fig]Figure 19 

Money-box by Angelica Duarte (Ava Guarani), 2000. Collection Museo 

del Barro. Paraguay