Garrido Law Firm

Faith, and the men driven by Faith, has been the most decisive constructive force in history. From the megalithic monuments of the pre-Christian period, the temples of classical civilizations, the pyramids that the pre-Columbian cultures left in America, to the stone cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the audacities of contemporary design, it is Faith that we find as the substrate of the talent of architects and builders and the effort and tenacity of bricklayers and workers.

These spaces were the seat of primitive cults, agoras conducive to the origin of social organizations, and fundamentally, places where individuals and communities established their links with transcendence.

In our territory, the colonizing currents that mostly from the north opened their way through lands as inhospitable as they were promising, were establishing, as milestones of the routes they opened, germinal settlements of what today are the cities and towns that make up the national geography.

Under the sign of the Cross, the founders would thrust their sword into the virgin soil, and before planning the fate of the land for the productive activity of the inhabitants, they would determine the spaces of privilege for worship and the civic and military powers, flanking the main square that would determine the layout of streets and houses. Churches, sometimes simple chapels or oratories, were thus erected at the same time as town halls and fortresses. Their towers served as viewpoints to scan horizons and futures, and their bells regulated the times of daily life.

These four preceding paragraphs are intended to summarize a long process of centuries, and still unfinished, which has had and has as its setting all the ends of the earth. The transfer of cultures, the dialogue that sometimes takes on the epic tone of struggle, has been modifying the original landscape through testimonial constructions.

This is the theme of the exhibition that Estudio Garrido Abogados is presenting today, at the last Gallery Night of the season, with works from its Paideia collection.

After the augural opening of a secluded chapel by Fray Guillermo Butler, paintings by artists who interpreted the Poblano chapels, the urban churches and even the cathedrals that were marking the landscape in this new land are displayed on the panels.

The chapels of the northern road, which opens in the Humahuaca ravine, are seen in the works of Italo Botti, Egidio Cerrito, Tomás Di Taranto, Osmán Páez and Marcela Rettig, among others.

The churches of Córdoba and its towns find interpreters such as Jorge Larco, Luis Tessandori, Miguel Carlos Victorica and Jorge Villar Matthis, and some Buenos Aires temples are glimpsed in the works of Oton Ringer, Manuel Vidal Barros and Zami Treguer. More imposing, the cathedrals of San Isidro and Mercedes, in the province of Buenos Aires, take on the leading role in paintings by Alfredo Bertani, Lola Frexas, Luis Cordiviola and Juan Otero.

When three years ago we presented a first version of this exhibition, we closed our words by pointing out that "with art as the medium and Faith as the center of the message" this exhibition eloquently expresses the purpose of its organizers.

Adrián Gualdoni Basualdo

November 2013