Non-fungible MADÍ: bringing Carmelo Arden Quin’s artwork to the blockchain

A joint work with the Arden Quin family to bring his ideas and interpretations to the blockchain and to a new public. Each work that is exhibited will come with the original physical work, be it a painting or a sculpture.

We are very thrilled to announce “Non-fungible MADÍ” by Carmelo Arden Quin, an unprecedented drop on the AURA platform. This is the first time that three works from a Latin-American 20th century grandmaster are dropped on Aura. We worked together with the Arden Quin family to bring his ideas and interpretations to the blockchain and to a new public. Each work that is exhibited will come with the original physical work, be it a painting or a sculpture.

Carmelo Arden Quin (1913–2010) was a key figure in the gestation of Arturo. Abstract arts magazine, which kicked off the emergence of the avant-garde of Rio de La Plata concrete art. Between 1945 and 1946 he was a member of the Concrete Invention Art Movement (MACI) and the MADI Group together with Martín Blaszko, Rhod Rothfuss, Gyula Kosice, Diyi Laañ, Elizabeth Steiner, the musician Esteban Eitler and Paulina Ossona, among others, fundamental artists in the renovation of the plastic arts of Latin America.

The exhibited works by these groups stand out for their innovative and experimental nature, and for the priority given to invention in them. They investigate and create various plastic solutions: the orthogonal frame, the frame as a work of art in itself, which sometimes appears as the only plastic object; the painting of articulated or coplanar color planes and articulated sculptures. In the co-planars, the geometric forms painted on wood, cut out and articulated with rods, were placed directly on the wall, in such a way that they allowed the viewer to modify the conformation through the movement of its parts.

In the first exhibition of NFT works by artist Carmelo Arden Quin, Aura presents three of his most important works, in which some of the artist’s main contributions to local art history can be seen: the undulations and holes that characterized his plastic language, his “galbeé forms” that present a concavo-convex movement on the support, the cutouts in his paintings and sculptures and the games with the frames that adapt to the contended forms in his paintings. Always interested in playful and participative aspects, he included in his works articulated and removable forms, suspended spheres and mobile parts that allow movement and oscillation.

In September 1948, he left for Europe on the ship Ravello. In Paris, he frequented Michel Seuphor, Georges Vantongerloo, Marcelle Cahn, Auguste Herbin, Jean Arp, Georges Braque and Francis Picabia, among other European avant-garde artists, and presented his MADI works in group exhibitions and at the Salon des Realités Nouvelles.

He returned in the 50’s, although in this period he worked between Buenos Aires and Paris. In Argentina he promoted the founding of the Arte Nuevo Association –a movement open to painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians and architects–, while in France he started the Atelier Madiste, which later led to the International MADI Movement.

In the 1960s he dedicated himself to poetry, founded the Ailleurs magazine and created collages with papers and found objects with DADA roots, while in the 1970s he revitalized his MADI work. From that moment on, he returned to perforations and holes, found other variants for irregular formats, replaced oil with acrylic paint and incorporated materials produced by the industry: pressed cardboard, veneered plates, acrylic plates, aluminum bars, mirrored surfaces or transparent, metal parts or chrome.

In the production of this period, the series Aleatoire, Domaine, Fleche du temps, Gesta, Joie, Miroir, Plastique, Symétrie stand out, in which color was treated with a vibrant palette or with the austerity of black on a white background, with the visual textures caused by the materials or with the plots drawn with stripes, with the transparencies and luminosity of the acrylic plates or with the mirrored surfaces of the metal, variants that put into work the freedom always present in the poetics of this artist, who He worked until his last days at his home in Savigny sur-Orge, where he died on September 27, 2010.

Aura Team