Galeria Inox

“Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents can also arise from it.”

(C. G. Jung)

Gustavo Genta’s work is multifaceted. Indeed, it functions like a fabric where interests, registers, and approaches to form and the expressive possibilities of materials are closely interwoven. Genta has succeeded in building a body of work presented as a system of signs, a personal language that enables him to engage with different supports, mediums, and formats, while consistently sustaining a singular, recognizable style. His pieces dialogue with architecture, enhancing it and subverting the order of these vital spaces in non-trivial ways, opening up new registers to possible monochromatic plays and multiple light effects.

To produce his works, Gustavo Genta relies on a personal methodology informed by his background in industrial design. He demonstrates a drive to generate industrial processes alongside his team: serial, rational, safe, and optimized procedures, which he blends with personal and emotional choices to endow his creations with balance and harmony. His aesthetic investigations yield new forms and what he fondly refers to as “families of work.”

Genta was part of a generation of students who graduated in the early 2000s from the Industrial Design Center of Uruguay (CDI). The CDI marked a milestone in the history of Uruguayan design, preparing a cohort of young creatives for a newly industrializing nation. Mirroring the dilemma posed by Pedro Figari in 1919, “Either we industrialize, or we are industrialized”, Uruguay developed a center of excellence in the late 1980s, initially supported by international cooperation. Educated with a European orientation, these young designers were guided toward creating and developing industrial products for series and large-scale production. Creativity and inventiveness were directed toward defining, crafting, and developing new objects aimed at meeting the needs of businesses and individuals alike.

“The end of representation has arrived,” proclaimed the Concrete Art manifesto, an emblematic document of “the Concretos”, abstract artists in 1940s Buenos Aires who sought to express forms and colors devoid of any link to objective reality. Tomás Maldonado, an indisputable authority in the development of industrial design as a distinct discipline, defined design as the cultural assimilation of the technical object. Maldonado was part of that group of Concrete artists who embarked on the quest for a new profession. Gustavo Genta’s trajectory is similarly significant: a singular path leading from design to artistic abstraction.

According to Hannah Arendt, people who produce things often do not fully comprehend what they do; they are part of a chain of processes necessary to yield a product. Conversely, the term “craftsmanship” is commonly associated with a way of life displaced by industrialized society, along with manually fabricated objects bearing a personal stamp. In his book “The Craftsman” (2008), Richard Sennett posits that craftsmanship designates an enduring, basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. The scholar understands craftsmanship as the skill to make things well through a knowledge of materials and a technical understanding often linked to the power of our imagination. It is precisely at this intersection that Genta’s production resonates—in his pursuit of refinement, functional dexterity, and material qualities that ultimately inform an aesthetic investigation transcending the object itself to project into the field of art.

Working groups, “families,” in Genta’s words, form bodies of work that utilize shared technical and formal resources, acting as production lines within a universe that evolves almost daily. “Doing is thinking.” Material searches and technical formal developments concatenate into pieces that enable new works and carve out new paths. In the act of making lies the expression of a mode of thought and a formal refinement, culminating in a ongoing aesthetic search and a continuous investigation into production processes.

His works float with elegance; Genta constructs forms that simply are forms, that do not presume hermetic messages, nor do they attempt to abstract themselves from natural phenomena or try to represent them. Instead, they offer immediate gratification to the viewer.

The evolution of abstract hanging sculpture spans more than a century. Approached by successive historical avant-gardes, this lineage owes a decisive contribution to a group of prominent Latin American artists who expanded the boundaries of a fascinating language. According to French curator Matthieu Poirier, these works share a commitment to the dynamic spatialization characteristic of the modern gaze. That collective 20th-century endeavor to evade gravity is taken up once more by Genta’s translucent sculptures. Fitted with tiny, nearly weightless mirrors, they cast shadows and reflections into their surroundings becoming works that are “sensitive to their immediate environment.”

References to art history in Genta’s oeuvre are not uncommon, particularly investigations into optical phenomena, serial art (the repetition of formal elements), and Kinetic art in its Latin American tradition, evoking the experiments of Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela, 1923–2005) and the sculptures of Gertrud Goldschmidt, known as Gego (Germany, 1912–1994). Although Gustavo Genta does not explicitly frame his practice as driven by art history, these connections are pertinent for placing his work within a collective, sensitive construct—one aligned with the contributions of artists who ventured to rethink artistic forms and formats across our continent. Genta’s sculptures also evoke, at a certain distance, the wire constructions of León Ferrari (Argentina, 1920–2013), such as “Torre de Babel” (Tower of Babel) 1961, and “Planetas” (Planets) 1979, as well as the instruments Ferrari created during his stay in São Paulo in the 1980s “artifacts for drawing sounds, intended to create musical, visual, and tactile events or sums of events,” or as Ferrari described them, “musical instruments that dance to their own music.”

For Genta, an exhibition functions as an archive presenting the momentary state of a continuous experimental process to which he devotes himself with emphatic commitment: studio work as the nucleus of the artist’s investigations and operations. “Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes joy,” affirmed Johannes Itten, the Swiss painter, designer, and Bauhaus master who later taught at the HfG Ulm.

Gustavo Genta’s inquiries stem from a personal restlessness, a free spirit finding in materials sensitive worlds to create objects that transcend superficial values. His practice proposes form as beauty while transforming ideas and sensations into what Swiss architect, artist, and designer Max Bill termed “visible substance.”

Martin Craciun.