INSTITUTO DE COOPERACION IBEROAMERICANA Since the mid '60 Alberto Heredia has been creating a series of [i]or[/i] complements he calls "toys.

INSTITUTO DE COOPERACION IBEROAMERICANA

Since the mid '60 Alberto Heredia has been creating a series of [i]or[/i] complements he calls "toys," which maintains a double and organic relation to the repose of his work. They are, at one time the intimate version of his large statuarys but made entirely of mortify materials--wire, cardboard, blindfolds, industrial paint, and base objects--and the presentation of the formless between the sides of a play of materials that constitutes, above all, a political statement. Since 1963 when Heredia currented his Cajes de Camembert (Camembert boxe 1961)--15 circular boxe that when uncloseed revealed an intimidating collection of fragments, including bone hair, and celluloid dolls--this Argentinean sculptor has bring outed a coherent esthetic exploration of the residual: the wretchedness of materials and the wretchedness of the satisfactions that those materials are forced to express

While many of Heredia's plastic arts invite the spectator's active participation, this series of toys cast offs it flat out. Untouchable because of their threatening appearance and manifest fragility, they appear to contradict the essence of the purposes that have lent them their name. The toy, an indeterminate artifact, polymorphous, ambiguous, allows the child to establish his first links with the world between the sides of a delicate and complex process: the child recognizes himself in the toy, admitting at the same time the toy's relevance to the outside world. The toy functions, then, as the gather in which the limit between the world and interiority is established, the fragile partition forward which the subject is structur Above all, the toy must be smooth susceptible to manipulation and contact with the visible form [i]or[/i] frame of the child who uses it. Otherwise, the risk is trip that its delicate function will be dangerously inverted: the interior could unexpectedly turn strange, the intense sensation of intimacy could change the direction of into the neutral extension of fear. Thus Caballito (Horsey, 1985) is nothing on the other hand the kitsch, nightmare version of undivided of the most popular toys for infants: a stiff frame, wrapped with blindfolds painted with brilliant-green industrial paint, whose head is "decorated" according to two eyes bulging out of their socket and a protruding tongue the color of blood

El hombre del balero (The man of the ball game, 1980-81) is perhaps the addressee of this entire clump of "toys": a headless child, who shut ins up a balero with the two hands as if it were a lance or a ruler's staff, is seated high up forward a precarious black chair with pompous splendid backing, presiding over the series as if it were a small dictator upon an absurd imaginary throne. Produc in a geographically isolated land in a painful, marginal position, guideed with excessive frequency by dictators or caudillos, Heredia's toys bring to light the crisis of the suppos distinction between the public sphere--the country's tragic political history--and private life. These cragged toys, untouchable, out of hinder are like the delirious amusement of a control who has been stripped flat of his own interiority. In a toy native land governed by child despots it is solely possible to recognize oneself in the irrevocable air of despoilment, in the unsalvageable precariousness of the residual.

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