WOOD ENGRAVING ON A LOW FLAME
By Miguel Briante

Iglesias Brickles often admits that in his work, which starts taking shape in the 80s in Buenos Aires -a city to which the artist is strongly connected, although he was born in Curuzu Cuatia in 1944- the German and Scandinavian expressionists had a strong influence, particularly the interwar avant-garde -Munch, Dix, Beckmannand all those who, like them, turned graphic arts into a means to convey irony, but also into one to narrate tragedy. Those artists crossed the mental frontier that engraving imposes on many of its practitioners -that rigidity of the craft, perhaps because the hand, in this discipline, appears so powerful before the material- and pushed its limits, as later did the Americans Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg. Faithful to that concept of boldness, Iglesias Brickles has even considered an engraving as a simple starting point, which he later colors or modifies at will until arriving -against the idea of series that surrounds graphic techniques- to his xilopinturasl, a collection of originals.

But a realistic line, a line of attachment to the world, drives him through the meanders of experimentation. The language of the streets -of the signs, the signals, the faces, the people, the clothes, the power discourses, the fallen slogansunderpins those "series" that sometimes start but do not end, and that will be rounded off in time, after the artist has explored other images, other situations. Those comebacks -or rather, that persistency- have revealed to him that in the human fauna there are something like prototypes, incarnations of something that recurs over the years. He can search for some of Roberto ArIt's characters, for instance, in the crowds that walk through the city -album-city, text-city- or catch situations fit for a tango, or which happen because its protagonists have a tango-like soul. Situations that surround this kind of fiction, which supplanting reality -as soap operas do- become part of reality for people.

In "El Jorobadito" (The Little Hunchback) (1985), Iglesias strips the figure of all that is related to Arlt -the anecdotic, the historic. He then dresses him at will, but in very hard lines revealing the character's ancestral resentment. In "Velada danzante" (Dancing Soiree) (1984), a couple dances on a kind of stage. In the background,
there is a mirror, which does not reflect the wooden floor on which they dance, although it does reflect the loudspeakers,-the lights, the chair at one side. He transforms the scene into a desert, and the graphic sign representing sound -those beams- into a burst of light. In "Jesucristo entrando a la cancha de Boca" (Jesus Christ Entering Boca Stadium) (1993), Iglesias combines two of the trends shown in his work: the almost immediate, sometimes metaphoric representation with a (deceitful) religious content that speaks of superstition in plastic terms. Superstition, religiousness, fiction, myth, all seem to converge in "Apasionadamente" (Passionately) (1994) or in "La despedida" (The Farewell) (1994), which have their origin -the artist told Pagina/12- in the pictures of a book documenting the history of Argentine cinema up to the 50s. It is about the stereotyped kisses of the great movie stars of old with the almost femmes fatales who bent their bodies on screen as if they were dancing. From there had also stemmed his "Portefio basico" (Basic porteno2), also in 1993.

And there is a whole lot more to investigate in these show of engravings and xilopinturas in which Iglesias Brickles shows a stage of his work. These works, taken as a whole, alternate the language of the comic with the more traditional drawing, symbolism with realism, crudeness with nostalgia, in very precise, really intense sequences where something has happened or is about to happen.

Pagina/12, Buenos Aires, June 14, 1994

Notes
1. Oil on woodcut. T.N.
2. Of or relating to the City of Buenos Aires or its people, language, or culture. T.N.


A FERAL ARTIST
By Rafael Squirru

In order to track the stylistic progression preceding Iglesias Brickles's work, taking into account the German expressionists of this century is not enough, not even the unforgettable Mexican Posada and his skulls. Due to the roughness of his gouge cut, I have to go back to the Ars Moriendi and the Biblia Pauperum series of the