Alicia Díaz Rinaldi was born on the outskirts of the big city, in the town of Avellaneda, on October 25, 1944. Her early childhood was spent in the warehouses and corridors of the tannery owned by her parents, José Pepe Díaz Fernández and Rosalía Rinaldi. That factory in the suburbs was her home until she was four years old, when her family moved a little farther south, to the town of Wilde. Her first memories are of the overwhelming sadness that would bring her to tears whenever she saw the sky fill with clouds and lightning. In those moments, she would become anxious with a longing for light. Later on, she would discover that this silent battle between chaos and order, light and shadows, that plays out between opposite poles -or, as she would later learn to think of them, complementary poles-, would end up being key in her artistic explorations, in her pursuit to imagine a universe of her own.
As a child, Alicia spent her afternoons climbing the trees in her garden, which was packed with plants and fruit trees; she would eat tangerines and bask in the sun. Being a lively loner filled with curiosity, she would fervently read the Billiken children magazine’s short story collections that she shared with her sister Lidia, who was four and a half years older. Her parents weren’t keen on visiting art museums, but the whole family frequently attended classical music concerts, went to see operas at the Teatro Colón and took part in auctions held in antique stores. Eventually, the family moved to Buenos Aires, the capital city, finding a home in the southern colonial neighborhood of San Telmo, where Alicia spent her high school years.
When she was 14, and partly in an effort to overcome her shyness, she began taking painting lessons with Victor Chab, her first and most important teacher, who gave her valuable advice regarding the lines in her sketches and initiated her into the craft of painting. As it would be expected from such a mentor, he also introduced her to the universe of surrealism -a universe teeming with figures extracted from lucid dreams and a poetry made up of random imagery-, encouraged her to visit art exhibits, and put her in contact with a wide variety of classical and contemporary music during their lessons. Every Saturday, after leaving the workshop, young Alicia would head to Florida Street brimming with enthusiasm, as the ‘60s were exerting an intense influence in the artistic sphere: the Di Tella Art Institute had just been born, the Informalist movement was breaking the mold of stale bourgeois perception, happenings provided an endless stream of shocking color, and bars, art galleries and exhibition halls all over Buenos Aires overflowed with creative activity. On weekdays, after finishing school, she would devote herself to what she thought of as “the impractical”: studying French and practising ballet. In the mid ‘60s, she and her friend Ana Eckell took part in the children’s ballet Minino maúlla y baila, which was directed by Cecilia Bullaude and performed at the Di Tella Institute. The dancing pair (who, even back then, already saw themselves as future artists) would sneak out of rehearsals to play the voyeurs, as they couldn’t resist their desire to see what was going on in the other rooms of the institute.
In 1962, Díaz Rinaldi had her first individual exhibition: a selection of her abstract paintings, abounding with automatic gestures, was displayed at the Galería Galatea. She hadn’t turned 18 yet. The dialog and exchanges that took place in her teacher’s studio between her and other artists (Delia Cugat, Osvaldo Borda, and photographer Jorge Roiger) became even more intense a few years later, when Alicia, Oscar César Mara, Cugat, and Chab moved into an old rental house together in the Almagro neighborhood. There, each had their own workspace and they received regular visits from other artists, creating an environment where ideas were constantly interchanged. One day, Cugat and Reina Kochashian took a closer look at the drawings Alicia was making. Astonished by her talent for synthesis, they told her: “You must try engraving!”. That afternoon would mark a turning point in her life as an artist.
One summer, while vacationing with her mother in Rio de Janeiro, she met Carlos de Carvalho, a Brazilian journalist who was sharing an apartment with her best friend’s brother. They shared conversations, dinners and walks. Alicia returned to Buenos Aires with a burning feeling in her heart and, in the year that followed, letters flowed back and forth between the two cities. Then, there was another trip to Brazil, which brought with it more walks and talks; they were practically a couple at this point, still living in different countries but speaking on the phone every month. Six months went by like this, until Carlos flew south to Argentina and the couple confronted the issue: they would either break up, or be together at last. They chose each other.
In 1967, Alicia married Carvalho in Buenos Aires and two weeks later moved to Rio de Janeiro with a scholarship to study engraving at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM). The couple lived in Botafogo, a bohemian neighborhood with plenty of film societies, bars and cafés. During the summers, they would go down to the beach in the early morning hours and buy fresh fish straight from the fishermen; some weekends they would visit friends in Petrópolis, an area abundant with hills, riding on a scooter which they had to push on foot when the slopes got too steep. Most nights they would go see films from the nouvelle vague, or by Antonioni, Pasolini and Bergman, at the Art Film Cinema on Rua Paissandu, or they would have a coffee on the terrace of some bar and later take a stroll on the beach on their way home. Those were happy years, full of emotional and artistic growth. During the course of her Engraving and Graphic Techniques studies at MAM, which went on until 1969, she exchanged ideas with editors, artists and colleagues, she studied the history of Brazilian art and its Portuguese roots at length, and, given that the International Association of Art had an office at MAM, she was able to see world-renowned figures like Pablo Neruda or Indira Gandhi. She also had the opportunity to visit parts of the country known for their colonial architecture: she traveled through Ouro Preto, Congonhas do Campo and other towns, where she came in contact with what is known as the barroco brasileiro.
Things were moving at a fast pace and, that same year, she showed her work at Varanda gallery, in the Copacabana neighborhood. The Jornal do Brasil, the newspaper that published Clarice Lispector’s legendary chronicles, ran a story exclusively focused on Díaz Rinaldi, who looked splendid as she smiled in the photograph accompanying the article. In the interview, the 23-year-old artist explained: “My work shows the smallness of today’s man before the machine and the anguish he feels when he realizes there is nothing he can do to change that.” Pointing out the surrealist nature of her work, Argentine poet Raúl González Tuñón described Díaz Rinaldi in a review as an artist “with a singular sensitivity and a technique that combines vigor and delicacy. […] The works of this artist, who exalts the freedom of forms but doesn’t ignore certain rules regarding construction and balance, seem to us like strange ‘hanging poems’.”
Her Rio de Janeiro period was cut short by the welcomed arrival of her first and only daughter, Luciana. When she was born, Alicia decided she would raise her in Buenos Aires, so they moved back to her home country. In 1970, the new mother grew more and more passionate about engraving, a practice that was experiencing an upsurge in the realm of visual arts, both in Argentina (with the emergence of new spaces for the circulation and recognition of printed works) as well as abroad. Her research and experimentation in that field was key for the creation of her own path. She became fascinated with working with mirrored images. Her engravings sprung from the tension between the organic and the mechanized, and her characters were nebulous beings “who are yet to be or who have already ceased to be.” Figuration was shaped in correlation and opposition with abstraction, in the same way that ‘the natural’ did so with ‘the artificial’; the demarcation and deletion of limits between separate entities was starting to be a part of the identity of her artistic language.
Because of its multiplying nature and how much easier it made the transportation of the final works, engraving allowed Díaz Rinaldi to be in dialogue with colleagues from around the world. In 1970, she had her first exhibition in Bolivia’s National Museum of Art, she sent works to art competitions in Argentina, and she participated in engraving biennales in Spain, the UK, Poland, Germany, Italy, Puerto Rico and Norway, among other countries.
In 1973, she was invited by the Argentine Embassy in Paraguay to show her work in a solo exhibition in the national capital, Asunción. A few years later, in 1977, she returned to that city to share an exhibit with María D’Avola at Arte-sanos, an art gallery owned by Ticio Escobar and Teresita Jariton. There, she met cultural activist Carlos Colombino and artist/curator Osvaldo Salerno, as well as other prominent figures in the Paraguayan art scene. Critic Rafael Squirru commented on the experimental qualities of her work in the prologue for one of her exhibitions at Arte-sanos: “In a succession of stages that show a continuous drive to move forward, Alicia Díaz Rinaldi surpasses her own image, which keeps getting more and more distinct and refined, as a conductor of her orchestra of formal devices. By combining etching and aquatint techniques, just like Goya did, using wet paper to make good use of the surfaces raised by the embossment, she shapes her neo-figuration in counterpoint to her increasing use of large color areas amongst which the use of white stands out.” Meanwhile, Raúl Santana considered, in reference to an exhibit at Galería Balmaceda in 1977, that “Alicia Díaz Rinaldi’s engravings reveal her sharp technical skills and show a careful and premeditated organization of space.”
During the turbulent ‘70s, Alicia worked away relentlessly on expanding her artistic exploration (“I don’t think I can choose a piece of work I have made as my best one, the best one is always one that is yet to be done,” she said in an interview with El tribuno, a newspaper from Argentina’s Salta province), while simultaneously making public her work as a printer and editor. In 1974, she and the renowned poet Juana Bignozzi edited Pragmatismo, a collection of poems and etchings, whose first five copies included the original metal plates used for the works featured in the book. Pragmatismo would become an essay-book, the first of several that would help revitalize the practice of making artist’s books in the ‘80s. Díaz Rinaldi would continue to work not only on her own “book objects”, but also on collaborations with colleagues such as Alfredo Portillos and Gabriela Aberastury. Around this time she also established herself as a printer, adopting a battery of new techniques and tools that allowed her to edit original prints for Cristina Santander, Susana Rodriguez, Carlos Alonso and Luis Felipe Noé, among other renowned artists.
Right from the start, the ‘80s brought her two important awards: 1st Prize at Argentina’s Engraving and Drawing National Salon in 1980, and 2nd Prize at the Manuel Belgrano Municipal Salon in 1981. “Printing well is like speaking clearly and in an orderly manner,” she explained, in a phrase that also seems to serve as a guide in her work as an engraver. In an article published in Pepe magazine, the critic and artist Rosa Faccaro wrote: “In [Díaz Rinaldi’s] visual chronicles, the image does not constitute an autonomous and closed empire, a shut down world void of communication with its surroundings; the images, just like the words, just like everything else, cannot possibly avoid becoming captured in the plays of meaning; in multiple shifts, they come to regulate meaning within societies. From the moment in which culture takes control, the icon-text is already present in the creator’s mind.” A journalist from the Uruguayan newspaper La Mañana asked Díaz Rinaldi: “What technique are you most comfortable with?” Her reply is significant: “Doing research on techniques. I want to get the most out of each technique. I work with a chisel and use all the tools available, before letting the acid do its work. I want to explore all the possibilities of engraving and set myself new challenges and never be content with what I have already achieved.” These statements are crucial when it comes to understanding the changes that this decade would bring about both in her professional and personal life, such as her divorce from her husband, who relocated to Brasilia for work-related reasons.
In 1982, the Kandinsky gallery in Madrid held an exhibition of her works, along with a catalog containing three texts: Rafael Squirru’s La neofiguración en el grabado [Neo-figuration in engraving], Rosa Faccaro’s El lugar como posibilidad y el tiempo como modificación [Space as possibility and time as change], and Paloma Martínez-Moya’s El rostro del drama cotidiano [The countenance of everyday drama]. Martínez-Moya, a member of the Spanish Association of Art Critics, underlined that Díaz Rinaldi “feels the need to indicate that she could keep working on each one of her engravings indefinitely. She believes that when a thing is completely finished, it is as if it was also somewhat dead.” This notion of “open work” coincides, around those years, with the artist’s serial work and her interest in exploring space. An essay by Elena Poggi that was included in the book El arte del grabado (1982) [The art of engraving], published in Madrid and focused exclusively on Díaz Rinaldi’s art, places special emphasis on these two elements. Poggi observed that the artist’s serial work “lets her diversify a single aspect of the procedure, since the plate is one of the mediums that allow the most splendid combinations, revelations and variations. The same way that others have used the plate to extract its diverse states, our engraver thinks of the series as an expressive variant.” In relation to space within the work of art, Poggi further stated that “her latest works, compared with her early ones, present a very eloquent spatial hierarchy, since space takes on a predominant role in the design. This might be due to the use of large forms that require space to breathe and, in consequence, large and clean outlines; indeed, without being monumental, the large forms that are distinctive in Alicia’s works express a need to expand.” Additionally, Poggi anticipated further technical explorations and discoveries that would eventually appear in Díaz Rinaldi’s work: “Since the moment, incredibly early in her career, in which she abandons painting and takes on engraving, this technique becomes a ground for endless exploration. [...] New explorations bring about new variants in etching: the accentuating of bites and the cuts on the metal plate starting in 1975. [...] Perhaps the result of this cutting of the plate is connected with the means of collage, in the sense that it emphasizes the work’s material quality and its procedure.”
It was in 1984 when, thanks to a trip to Australia, Díaz Rinaldi learned about a technique that would allow her to produce a matrix using non-toxic materials: collagraphy. She teamed up with fellow artist Mabel Rubli to embark on a profound study of the history and intricacies of this practice, and in 1985 the duo held a seminar for artists in Argentina, where the technique had not yet been introduced. Alicia’s explorations would not end there: she expanded the concept of collagraph, incorporated new materials to the process, and gave courses on the technique in Chile and Paraguay. Collagraphy allows the artist to create a matrix using water soluble materials, such as acrylic varnish and gesso, and work on that surface by addition, instead of subtraction, as is the case with traditional engraving techniques such as xylography or etching. During this period, the breaking of limits imposed by traditional engraving became the keystone to her artistic practice.
The return to democracy in Argentina in 1983 had revived public life in Buenos Aires and reactivated the possibility of group work for local artists, who had been largely relegated to the private sphere during the country’s military dictatorship. Working alongside artist Matilde Marín, Díaz Rinaldi set out to transform the practice of engraving and question its standard procedures, the materials involved and the habitual use of paper and color. For this purpose, they founded Grupo 6, an art group that also included Olga Billoir, Mabel Eli, Zulema Maza and Graciela Zar. The group worked with an enormous degree of freedom to create works individually, and joined forces to reflect on the concept of space, involving installations, objects, graphic sculptures and large format artworks. “How many things can I try without ceasing to be myself? Is it the paper, the matrix, or the printing? Am I an engraver, a drawer, a painter or a sculptor? The question about identity is a prominent feature of the ‘80s. Some answers were reached at the time and they seemed to be: ‘we are what we act',” reflected María José Herrera in the catalog for the group’s Otra Gráfica exhibition at the Fundación Andreani a decade later. In 1985, Grupo 6 had their first exhibit Intuiciones, Intenciones, Impresiones at the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art. In the museum’s lobby, they placed some works made using heliography and Díaz Rinaldi showed her El francotirador, a work which generates different interpretation depending on the medium it is printed on (marble, lead, wood, leather, plastic, paper towels, etc.). The following year, the collective took part in the Critics’ Conference organized by Jorge Glusberg, sent works to Chile’s Valparaíso Biennale, held an exhibition at the Galería Ática and presented the second part of Intuiciones, Intenciones, Impresiones at the Eduardo Sívori Museum in Buenos Aires’ Centro Cultural Recoleta. For this exhibit, Alicia created an installation consisting of two large monoprints inspired by two 19th century paintings depicting rural scenes. These paintings -one ripped and the other intact- were framed together and placed beside the monoprints, which stretched up the walls and partially covered the arched ceiling, even becoming volumetric at a certain point: the grass was real grass, the stone was real stone. The engraving went from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, and spectators had to alter their posture and position in space in order to capture the work in its entirety. Around 1987, Mabel Eli left and Oscar Manesi joined the group, which had its work displayed at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. At the time, Díaz Rinaldi was also working in the GRABART collective, which had exhibitions at the National Museum of Decorative Art in 1989 and the Municipal Museum of the city of La Plata in 1990. The ‘80s, which at the start had brought her two important recognitions, reached a close with an even bigger one: in 1989 she received the Great Honor Engraving Award at Argentina’s XXV Engraving and Drawing National Salon. A few years later, in 1992, the Konex Foundation selected her as one of the country’s five leading engravers.
“I believe that the organization of aesthetic space is like calligraphy, something very personal and untransferable, and this is why I think that the teacher’s duty is to facilitate that each disciple can express themselves in their own language,” she said in an interview with the Uruguayan newspaper El día in 1993. This was a time of new ventures, trips and experiences, where knowledge took on a central role. Thanks to her technical know-how, she gave courses in Chile, Paraguay and also in Europe, where she travelled to twice a year, especially Germany (where she held courses jointly with Gabriela Aberastury between 1999 and 2005) and Spain. Her concept of education came to be based on the idea of “giving in order to receive”, since the exchange of knowledge about techniques and materials (polymers, polyester and aluminum lithographic plates, etc.) with her students and colleagues served as a source of growth for her own expressive means. These exchanges with others led to her collaboration with Hungarian artist Batuz’s foundation.
Her trips to the Old World during this period awoke in Alicia an interest in finding her own roots; as a result, she traveled through Italy and other European countries in search of traces of her ancestors. There, she became fascinated with architecture, especially with the remains of ancient empires (spires, columns, doors and friezes) and other ruins that she found herself surrounded by in every European city that she visited. Her 1991 exhibition Otra mirada: el fragmento, held at the Banco Patricios Foundation, was the perfect occasion to resort to memories of her exploration in those lands and incorporate them in a large installation where each work was related to the next, and all together as a whole formed one big piece that surrounded the cupola of the exhibition space. “This exhibition displays Díaz Rinaldi’s talent for transforming her chosen idea and objective into a sequence, with a development that is subjected to the tone of a ‘racconto’. [...] Her work presents a visionary archeology that, in a classic evocation, vindicates the perpetual and immobile aspect of memories. The graphemes of the fragment organize the images along memory’s intermittent stream,” wrote Rosa Faccaro about the exhibition in an article published in Clarín. Similarly, in the prologue for the 1992 exhibition 9 mujeres (which also includes works by Gabriela Aberastury, Malena Troslino, Nora Dobarro, Ana Godel, Diana Dowek, Martha Zuik, Elda Cerrato and Gloria Priotti), Raúl Santana commented: “Díaz Rinaldi creates worlds where we can see an obsessive blending of fragments of a memory which endlessly reorganizes images like powerful footprints that do not wane.” However, it was Ticio Escobar who offered the most precise description of this period in which the fragment takes a leading role in her works: “Alicia Díaz Rinaldi does not seem to commend the whole, but the fragment, which speaks of ruptures and of absences; the shred that reflects its amputated version of the totality, or the segment of a truth that occurs always beyond itself and that never reveals itself in its entirety. She does archeology in her own way: picking up remnants of history, quoting some fleeting moment that has already been quoted and forgotten many times before. With these scraps she assembles a new whole: it is a collage that is forever condemned to the broken form of the memory, with its deposits of different eras and ensembles of contradictory dimensions. But Alicia gains access to this unarticulated space through such rigorous work that it ends up creating an opening to a strange place ruled by the pure laws of the image, by the unrelenting logic of the graphic sign. From the tension between the clarity of the discourse and the confusion of the gaze (or between the reassurance of the totality and the unease of the fragment), the artist will draw inspiration to finish her eternally incomplete forms.”
In 1986, Díaz Rinaldi started a romantic relationship with Leonardo Gotleyb, an artist from northern Argentina’s Chaco province. Despite the age difference between them (Alicia being about 15 years older), the relationship lasted for almost two decades, during which they shared everyday life, trips, exhibitions, courses and seminars. Their work was frequently shown in joint exhibitions, as was the case with the exhibit Memoria gráfica, which also focused on the subject of memory, and Trabajos en papel, which took place in the Argentine consulate in Frankfurt. Later on, they showed their work in the German city of Kassel, home of the prestigious Documenta exhibition. They were asked to take part in the exhibition Das andere Gesicht (German for “The other face”) at the documenta, which displayed the works of contemporary Argentine artists alongside those by local artists. Other Argentine artists included in the exhibition were Gabriela Aberastury, Carlos Alonso, Hernán Dompé, Diana Dowek, Ana Eckell, Sara Facio, Germán Gargano, Eduardo Hoffmann, and poets Raúl Santana, Rodolfo Relman and María Elena Walsh (who contributed poems for the exhibition’s catalogue book).
The question about identity, which had hovered over her artistic explorations involving architectural fragments, became a central subject in her work; it is a subject that she would continue to probe restlessly over the following years. “Alicia Díaz Rinaldi turns each of her works into a creation that responds to a particular quest, and her images, somewhat distant and cold, achieve a conviction that is way above the mere projection of feelings or the simple application of an idea,” wrote Fermín Fevre for her 1995 exhibition at Galería Atica. Meanwhile, Albino Dieguez Videla stated in an article in the La Prensa newspaper that “Díaz Rinaldi’s work reveals an extremely rare sensitivity, by setting aside the anecdotal in order to commit to the essential, to something that can only be grasped by sensitivity.” On the other hand, Rosa Faccaro, in her 1996 text El grabado Argentino [Argentine engraving], insisted in underlining the concept of “open work” in Díaz Rinaldi: “In more than one way, she gives spectator an active role. [...] She assimilates the notion of ‘process’, discarding lifeless and stereotyped formulas, and attempts to reflect on artistic and sociocultural meaning.”
A liberty to freely mix materials and graphic techniques from a wide array of choices characterizes the work she did in 1998 for the Casa Rosada Museum, the art exhibition space within Argentina’s governmental palace. Irma Aristizábal, the museum’s director, found some watercolor blueprints made by renowned architect Francesco Tamburini and offered them to Díaz Rinaldi. The artist applied photoengraving over the blueprints, adding to the work her own views on life and culture. Insects moving across Doric columns and symbols indicating movement act as -in the words of Rosa María Ravera- “plastic writing or graphic scripture”. “The works of Alicia Díaz Rinaldi highlight two impulses. Her graphic work alternates the remainders of something unknowable that forever transcends form with that which defines form itself, allowing the classical canons to infiltrate and exert their incontestable authority. Ancient times return insofar as they expose the testimony of what has been. A recovered finitude which survives in simulacrum, in geometry’s play and in the symmetries that successfully counteract the efforts of disorder and chaos. [...] They speak of the impossibility to grasp completeness, the explicit possibility to give oneself away solely to the imperfect/perfect fragment. Productive life experiences of a work that unyieldingly builds itself over and over again, refined and wisely.”
At the end of the ‘90s, the National Fine Arts Museum asked her to take part in the exhibition Gráfica actual - Gráfica 12, dedicated to the engraving art scene in Argentina. Featuring works by Rodolfo Agüero, Ana Eckell, Leonardo Gotleyb, Juan Lecuona, Gustavo López Armentía, Matilde Marín, Zulema Maza, Eduardo Médici, Luis Felipe Noé, Liliana Porter and Mabel Rubli, the exposition toured through several museum halls in the country, which allowed the artists who attended the events to have direct contact with public from other areas. Additionally, Díaz Rinaldi exhibited her work in Rosario, one of Argentina’s largest cities: the exhibition of a series titled Evocaciones was displayed at the Bernardino Rivadavia Cultural Center. “Taking her proverbial balance between innovation and tradition to the limit, Díaz Rinaldi proves that the overflowing of boundaries between different disciplines and the originality of the material procedures involved in her work have no reason to be detrimental to plastic quality” wrote Beatriz Vignoli in an article published in newspaper El ciudadano y la región. The journalist also analyzed the techniques used by the artist and their peculiar effect on the viewer: “Díaz Rinaldi takes the concept of the chine collé technique, which consists in gluing, over the surface of the paper that will be the main support of the print, another layer of very thin paper, the thinness of which allows the artist to print the image on the two sheets of paper at the same time. But instead of using this technique, what Díaz Rinaldi does is to imitate its effect. Her ‘Evocaciones’ works look as if all their parts had been printed in one application of the matrix, which is impossible, given the difference in elevation between the several fragments that make up each piece. How did Díaz Rinaldi achieve this absurd feat, which is reminiscent of a dream? [...] The resulting effect is that the raised fragments stand out like plateaus over plains, arranged in space like tesseras, like pieces of ceramic retrieved by archeologists who are hoping to find the rest of the pieces to rebuild a whole. Such archaeological fiction exerts over the attentive spectator a seduction that is ridden with grief: the fragments will always be missing, the reconstruction will be forever incomplete. The holes must be tolerated: this is, indeed, a kind of beauty which is specifically modern.”
Always moving ahead and defying limits, around this time Alicia Díaz Rinaldi started delving into self-awareness, working around the idea of the self. Lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado, domingo (1999) kicked-off a series of self-portraits (consisting of intervened photographs) that she would go on to present in the following decade. “The artist has become aware that over the course of our lives, and on a smaller scale, in the brief time frame of the days of a week, we find multiple opportunities to try out different masks. [...] Beware, these are imprecise masks. That is not a nuance, since this is her métier. It is the inescapable relevance of an impeccable trade and the implicit attempt to probe one’s own Self. Accepting from the start the vital discontinuity of a (presumed) identity which puts to the test, dangerously, both change and permanence,” wrote Rosa María Ravera for the collective exhibition Autorretrato held at the Borges Cultural Center in 2001.
However, it was with La dualidad del universo (an exposition held that same year at the Recoleta Cultural Center) that this interior “under construction” became more evident. “The strategies and machinations are her own. It is she who produces, reads and interprets, thus obtaining the well-earned right to show herself. The right to present herself as an author, as a woman, as a body, as an eye and gaze,” wrote Ravera for that event. In the hall’s entryway, life-sized reproductions of Alicia (some facing the spectator, some with her back turned, and others of her profile) rehearsed various poses next to masks and faces and fragments of engravings that coexisted in the room with etchings containing insects trudging forward across the hallways of archaic structures (or, more accurately, their ruins) while arrows and symbols in relief pointed in strange directions. “These sort of invasive armies -not just animals but also arrows introducing disturbing spatial indications- voice the haunting antagonism between the order of a set and static world and the strong affirmation of the living,” observed Rosa Aiello, member of both the Argentine and the International Association of Art Critics. In a review for the weekly German-language newspaper Argentinisches Tageblatt, Susanne Franz considered that “the artist contrasts the rigidity of the architectural components with new resources: now, she gives the background of her works an ephemeral, playful tone. There, we find doodles, graffiti, sketches that appear to be tossed in anarchy onto the paper.” The writing becomes a body, and, with a gesture, Díaz Rinaldi evokes in the surface of the work a duality opposing reason to emotion, chaos to order, nature to culture. During this period, the artist would explore these contrasts between factions, leaning closer to each pole and back again, searching for a sense of balance.
Around that time, her family was split between Spain and Argentina. Her daughter Luciana had moved to Barcelona after getting a masters in graphic design and, in 2006, Alicia’s granddaughter Alexia was born. Since 1999, Díaz Rinaldi had been giving summer courses in the Spanish town of Fuendetodos (the birthplace of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), so she had a good excuse to visit Europe once a year. Her daughter’s emigration was not a problem for her: “It was always clear to me, since she was born, that Luciana belonged to the world, she wasn’t my property and she had to follow her intuition and her desire. So I helped her in every way that I could so that she could accomplish her goals,” explained Alicia.
From 2002 to 2008 Díaz Rinaldi showed her work and gave courses in other Spanish cities: Valladolid, Málaga and Marbella. In the meantime, her technical research and experimentation remained constant. In an emblematic text about Díaz Rinaldi’s life’s work entitled El grabado como lenguaje simbólico [Engraving as a symbolic language], Rosa Faccaro highlighted “her technical explorations, like her use of collagraph, polymers, photo transfers, Hayter’s techniques involving metal sheets and ink density, and the articulation of a language that is rich with clear suggestions that stay with the observer. Formal synthesis is one of her personal traits, along with the clear scripting of her features, her gestures, her forcefulness, or her incisive levity.” In 2007, the Galería Matthei, in Santiago de Chile, held an exhibition of her works entitled Impresiones al rojo . That same year, Díaz Rinaldi wrote a short text for ¿En qué piensan las mujeres? [What do women think about?], a collective event organized by the Transarte gallery in Buenos Aires. Written with a sincere and intimate tone, Alicia Díaz Rinaldi listed people and works that had a significant impact on her life, as well as personal reflections and opinions: “One contemporary artist that I’m interested in is Frank Stella, because he is a free spirit. A great friend of mine is Gabriela Aberastury. People that have been my friends my whole life: Delia Cugat, Sergio Camporeale, Zulema Maza, Matilde Marín and Gabriela Zar. I’m a person who really values friendship. I have a lot of respect for people who have ethics and that care about aesthetics. I’m moved by the innocence of children, by babies, by the fragility of the elderly and by the sea. Freedom, friendship and respect are fundamental values for me. My phrase of choice: ‘A violent action generates a reaction that is equally or more violent’. My go-to book is The power of now by Eckhart Tolle. I listen to classical music, Bach and Mahler, as well as Sakura and Ravel, depending on my mood. I would’ve liked to be a singer. I’m fascinated by the revolution in technology. I don’t think fanaticism serves any purpose other than hiding emptiness and insecurities. I enjoy salads and the scent of tuberoses. I incorporate the new developments in visual arts, photography, printing and computer science into my own craft. We Argentines are boastful, loud, intelligent, curious and spontaneous. In my leisure-time, I go to the cinema, the theater and the opera. Every time Casablanca is on TV, I rewatch it. I’m scared of being out of tune when I’m singing with a choir. My biggest misfortune would be to lose someone I love. My main traits are my patience and my inner light. I believe in the notion of a supreme being; I believe in all gods, because they are all one and the same.”
The year 2008 would mark the beginning of a period of changes in her work’s configuration. The exhibition Dos en uno at the galería RO displayed a stronger emphasis on the use of colors, which appear in the form of quasi-pixels or mosaics: reds, blues and yellows dominate the pieces, orchestrated to bring together a balanced whole. The text accompanying the exhibit, written by Ravera, reads: “There is a non-demanding, but solicitous, invitation to rethink past experiences in light of the new. [...] It seems to be about that, about the world itself, its changes and its constancies. This is how Alicia perceives it; what she thinks and what she feels go together: mental faculties and feelings could not be set apart, because to her, plastic solutions are existential propositions. Her vision of art, painting and engraving implies a worldview, a real Weltanschauung.” The titles of the drypoint and stencil works she exhibited around this time were eloquent: Reflejos interiores [Interior reflections], Visión lunar [Lunar vision], Más allá del silencio [Beyond silence], Espacio-tiempo [Space-time], La Revelación [The revelation] and, of course, Signos [Signs]. In an article published in the Argentine newspaper Ámbito Financiero, art critic Laura Feinsilber pointed out that the artist “seems more straightforward, expressing through the formal plane a return to the essence of engraving. Fragmented geometrical images, tracks of random incisions, little stains that travel across the surface and then dissolve into nothing, the whiteness of the paper (a void on which these elements are inserted), the provocative use of painting in areas of color allow her to solve expressive problems that define the state of her current work.”
Dos en uno kept her busy for the whole year, because the exhibit went out on a national tour: in May and June, it was on display at the López Claro Museum in Azul, a city in Buenos Aires province, and in October it was taken to the Dr. Juan R. Vidal Provincial Museum of Fine Arts, in Corrientes province. In an article published in the art magazine Ramona, artist Luis Espinosa wrote: “the secret form of these works is not to be found in the two-dimensionality that they were masterfully composed in. Their secret form is in the direction of the spatial penetration, which is perpendicular to the plane and creates an overlay of the levels, unlike the optical illusion of perspective (the illusion of depth). Here, the effect begins with the experience of the close-up view, the focus of consciousness, and stretches into the distance, reverting layer after layer the depth of our own depth. A way of interrogating a mirror to find out about ourselves. A palimpsest of the unconscious. Emotion lies there.”
Díaz Rinaldi’s vast life’s work spreads across diverse mediums and expressive channels, with multiple variations in terms of her materials. But one can also visualize this artist’s journey in the array of topics that have caught her attention throughout her career. Her preoccupations cover territories as dissimilar as each of the pieces of a mosaic. The transformations that technology introduces in everyday life; human rights; art history and the lives of artists; ancient architecture and its relationship with the past and the present via the concept of the fragment; the relationship between nature and culture, chaos and order, abstraction and figuration, and their balance within the work of art. The list goes on. Additionally, all her artistic endeavors have carried the mark of her social conscience and her unrelenting commitment with her trade, two characteristics that were publicly recognized in 2010, when the National Academy of Fine Arts awarded her with the Alberto J. Trabucco Prize. “I believe in journeys. When I decided to be an artist, I did not choose success, I chose the journey. And that journey was packed with goals that were eventually achieved: municipal, national, international prizes… And the Trabucco was an important goal for me. It seems that it came at the right time and that it is, on the other hand, a recognition for a life dedicated to art,” Alicia said in an interview with art magazine Arte al Día.
Indeed, it is a journey that keeps on going and takes her further with every breathing moment. Tiempo circular, her 2011 exposition at the gallery at the Mundo Nuevo Foundation, she experimented with heterogeneous relations within the pictorial space by including, on the surface of the canvas, organic-looking engravings that coexist in peace with geometric structures painted with pure colors. Critic Julio Sánchez wrote for this exhibition: “In many of her works there is a binary arrangement of forms, color surfaces that confront the impulse of lines, organic drives and scattered stains. On one side, there is a two-dimensional universe full of color and geometrically organized; on the other, a restless, effulgent and unpredictable world of lines, stains and textures. In all of these works there is a tacit assertion: they seem to tell us that the universe is organized in both a solid appearance (as in the walls of color) and a subtle state (represented by the unpredictable). The rose quartz that she has at her home-studio also exists like Alicia’s work, it has a material existence that we can describe with words, but at the same time holds a microscopic vibration (‘infra-mince’, as Marcel Duchamp would call it), which is hard to comprehend under the parameters of reason. One must block out the traditional ways of knowledge in order to gain access to the archaic memory of the stone. In each of her works, Alicia opens the way for a passionate dialectic between different planes of reality, a dialog between the visible and the invisible world.”
Around that time, the works and actions of the Grupo 6 in the ‘80s were revisited in two important collective exhibitions. The first one, which took place at galería RO in 2010, had the group as its sole focus, while the other, held at the OSDE Foundation’s Art Space in 2013, was an anthology of works by Argentine graphic artists and groups from the period between 1960 and 1990 that was curated by Matilde Marín. Meanwhile, Alicia kept participating in exhibitions and events centered on engraving, both in Argentina and abroad. Her regular trips across countries and continents brought to the surface a new preoccupation and topic of study for Díaz Rinaldi, one that was somewhat ignored at first but that would eventually become one of the biggest issues in developed nations: the migration of people from war-torn and poverty-stricken Arabic and African countries to Europe. Over the following ten years, Díaz Rinaldi would devote herself to the making of a series of works that was shown in Berlin in 2015 and, two years later, at the Quinquela Martín Museum in La Boca, in Buenos Aires’ port-area. While she was working in the south of Spain, the artist started noticing the arrival of boats loaded with people from Africa, as reporters on television and newspapers repeatedly told of deportations and of deaths caused by the poor conditions of their journey. These stories had a profound impact on her, and she felt a pressing need to speak out about them. That’s how she devised a work that simulated a huge anthill (our world), torn and broken by a war that forces thousands and millions of beings to move from one part of the planet to another, to form a new nest to live in together. Made up of photographs, installations and engravings, the exhibition Migraciones: un viaje a la esperanza [Migrations: a journey toward hope] was a landmark in her career, as it represented a new conceptual direction in her work. Curator Rodrigo Alonso wrote a text for that exhibition where he emphasized the poetic discourse that emanated from the group of works: “Even though in many cases these works are based on documentary material, they function as metaphors and allegories, multiplying meanings and raising singular individual cases to the category of the archetype. Leaving names aside, [Díaz Rinaldi] presents the subject matter as an event that affects humanity as a whole, as well as each and every human in particular. From a formal standpoint, she resorts to a minimum of elements. Graphic footprints that look like maps translate into never-ending territories. [...] With this exiguous vocabulary, Alicia Díaz Rinaldi regulates the rhymes of her poetic discourse. Through the use of graphic techniques, she combines, opposes, highlights and merges images, eventually complemented by the faces and bodies of migrants as broadcasted by mass media. This mixture gives rise to conflicts and tensions, visual narrations that stimulate both thought and imagination.” Additionally, Alonso reflected on the importance of the observer’s participation in the discursive universe put forth by the artist: “A mirror intervened with ants and paper boats duplicates the venue, incorporating the observer in the complex network of realities and symbols. The immediacy of the visitor’s reflection supposes a rupture in the mediated universe of artistic materials, re-linking it to the present and inviting the observer to urgent reflection. There, where the alchemy of aesthetic elements reinforces the uniqueness of art’s knowing powers and critical potential; there, where already known events take on a new dimension that pulls them out of the naturalization where they have been put by mass-media; right there is where one is compelled to take some time to meditate. [...] Finding himself included in the mirror along with the suffering masses, the spectator cannot help but to experience empathy, bringing him emotionally closer to those multitudes. After all, Migraciones: Un viaje a la esperanza is not meant to document or report the vicissitudes of African émigrés, but to provoke an emotional response to the conditions in which a large number of human beings spend their lives on the planet we all share. [...] If this is not possible, then art would become merely illustrative and it would lose its ability to make an impact and introduce transformative ideas.”
With every new work, Alicia Díaz Rinaldi renews her way of looking and thinking about art’s social, intellectual and cultural purpose. In San Telmo, the Buenos Aires neighborhood where she lives and works, and where her two latest exhibits took place in 2018, she is considered a living and breathing eminence. The contributions she made in her field will be passed on to new generations, who will be guardians of an ancient trade that survives through the work of masters and disciples alike. Her life’s work carries at its heart the indelible imprint of a restless drive for transformation, one that seeks to bring together the opposite poles of a challenging, and above all, captivating, universe.
Lorena Alfonso