Osvaldo Romberg:
Orders and Constellations
In a country like ours, the word “order” has inevitably become associated with “rigidity.” In its original meaning, however, an order suggests a deep relation among things, a correlation based on norms, one that admits certain degrees of freedom.
The history of art is a history of the evolution of that relation on the terrain of esthetics, which has embodied styles, schools, and academies. For these institutions, the existence of certain methods and rules of composition has laid the terrain on which the creative imagination can unfold. On the other hand, painters like Malevich or Mondrian, sought an order that would enable them to get past the subjectivism of art, trusting the possibility of attaining, with its help, a truth of plastic values.
For more than forty years, Osvaldo Romberg has devoted himself to analyzing the production of these architects of orders. And in the process, he has revealed the structural scaffolding on which rest the disordered feelings that underlie taste and estethic emotion.
Confronting the figures of genius, inspiration, and spontaneity, his work lays bare processes and typologies that lead artistic activity back to its objective, material sources. Colors, perspectives, and brush-strokes become the elements of a language which, despite their ancientness, seem to reveal themselves for the first time.
However, the aim of Romberg’s work is not to desanctify; rather, the analysis it offers would appear to be a singular method for understanding the potentiality of the orders in their every dimension. The installation The Hanover Color Constellation 82-83 is a case in point. In it, the colors of the chromatic circle move over the exhibition space following a strictly established formal logic: at each point in space a correspondent tonality is given as an objective datum, a truth about color. In pieces like this, Romberg confesses his admiration for those who made plastic values elements in a system of ordered expression.
Rodrigo Alonso