Viewing page 5 of 49

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

2

of these scrolls. The two-fold influence of Oriental and abstract expressionist painting allowed Davidovich to work toward a new spatial sense in his work, one that moved far beyond the constraints of European easel painting.

These influences involved more than the shattering of formal constraints. Within the opening created by this shattering, there emerged for Davidovich the possibility of coming to terms with the vast, flat, desolate landscape that surrounds Buenos Aires, a landscape which was, for him, highly resonant with the spiritual and cultural situation of Argentinian society. Of this geography's importance for his work, Davidovich notes:

When I came back to Argentina, I went traveling and I saw the same concept that was found in the paintings. It was typical of Argentina, where we have that vacuum. Not only a cultural vacuum but a literal vacuum in the landscape. That is what the landscape of Buenos Aires Province is: it's a big, solid, flat surface. And you just see the soil and the sky and nothing else. And you can drive for miles and miles and you don't even see one ranch. Nothing. And I remember that I used to take trains and go from Buenos Aires all the way to the South and travel for ten hours. And in the ten hours you would see a few ranches scattered around and nothing else. And it was very intriguing, that boredom. Just to look at the same thing, the same landscape. And at the same time it is changing: the clouds, the color of the sky, the kind of soils, the kind of vegetation or crops. It was very interesting for me just to look from the train and from the bus at this variation in crops. That was a strong influence in the development of the work.