Works of Florencio Molina Campos with the participation of Pablo Accinelli
Galería Roldán Moderno, Buenos Aires
2022

Florencio Molina Campos detested poor taste, vulgarity, and crassness. According to his biographer, he coined the term “moriscotano” to refer to such things while, horrified, he watched as the outskirts of Buenos Aires were overtaken by poorly painted cement elves, swans, flamencos, and mini-gauchos. I reference that assessment of his aesthetic horizon to begin to speak of his unique artistic vision from a sarcastic, and not at all solemn, perspective that evidences its paradoxes and ongoing relevance.

It is no mean feat to walk back the many layers of reading that have settled over the artist’s peculiar trajectory. He circulated both within the art sphere and beyond its confines and enjoyed immense popularity. It was not until after his death that he was valorized by an art system that had looked on him with askance. Today, he occupies an odd place, a hodgepodge of all earlier assessments; he is at the center of conflicting interests, but lifeless traditionalism is the leading contender when it comes to projecting his legacy.

In my first draft of this presentation of his works I tried to underscore their painterliness, their status as pictorial objects, to distance them from a history linked to reproduction and advertising. I even fantasized about including the phrase “What you see is what you see”—those words uttered by North American painter Frank Stella that would become a sort of slogan for minimalism—to speak of the overt images of “the most Argentine of our Argentine artists,” as, from horseback, Ignacio Gutiérrez Zaldívar called him. Not even the most polished piece of metal by Carl André is spared being “complicated” by the conditions of its emergence and exhibition, by the weight of its context and the vectors of its era and history itself.

Picture a counterfactual scene: Molina Campos holed up in his ranch “Los Estribos”—half enclave of inspiration and half stage set—in Moreno, Buenos Aires province, painting his works for rural galleries and rural collectors, for their eyes only. Picture that as his sole horizon, his only sphere of action. With that image, we would lose sight of the fact that his production took shape in a free exchange with advertising, the mass media, and foreign policy; we would lose sight of the performatic quality of his role as painter of the Pampas—in English—and as bearer of the gaucha truth.

From his biography, we learn he was born to a blue-blooded family—bluer than almost any other family, in fact—in Buenos Aires. As a child, he split his time between the city and the ranches “Los Ángeles,” in Tuyú, Buenos Aires province, and “La Matilde,” in Concordia, Entre Ríos province. That was where he learned to love the men of the countryside and their landscape—a love he expressed in drawings and stories. That criollo idyll came to a sudden end with his father’s unexpected death. Our artist now had to find a way to earn a living while he harbored in the intimacy of painting the memory of that happy rancher’s-son childhood. After failing in a number of commercial ventures in the farming sector, the first triumph of his life—that was how to described it—came at the age of thirty-five: an exhibition of art (the first), in 1926, in the framework of the annual Exposición de la Sociedad Rural Argentina. That show would be followed by exhibitions at the Mar del Plata branch of Witcomb gallery and at the next edition of the Exposición Rural, in 1927. For that show, Molina Campos designed and sent out an invitation that recreated gauchesca speech. He signed it “Tiléforo Arequito in the name of his patron Florencio Molina

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