LATIN AMERICAIN ART OF THE 20th CENTURY

Christie's 119 x 144 cm - 1991

Argentina is also producing a talented new generation of expatriate artist; among them Octavio Blasi (b. 1960), whose work is marked by irreverent humour and an imaginative use of mixed-media techniques. One series of works, with fragmented images and thick pieces of wood collages to canvas, is in step with the European Neo-Expressionism of the 1970s and 1980s.

In another, later series, the imagery is more specific, and the humour much blacker. In one work a green Mickey Mouse is nailed to a cross bearing the label "Christie's" where one expects to see the letters INRI. On either side is hardly very subtle, but it is somehow very Latin American for an artist to use Pop Art techniques to criticize the materialism of American mass culture. The piece is also technically interesting: it is made from colour-impregnated paper pulp, using the method familiar from David Hockney's Paper Pools of the late 1970's.

Edward Lucie-Smith