Osvaldo Lamborghini Art Stage Exhibition

Next Thursday, the 15th, at 6 pm, the exhibition by Osvaldo Lamborghini, I am your supplier, will open at the Galería del Infinito (Av. Pte. Manuel Quintana 325, Buenos Aires). It will be open to the public from Monday to Friday from 10 am to 6 pm until October 10. Curated by Agustina Perez, this exhibition brings together the works of the writer and artist that refuse to be isolated.

The works are pages torn from their original post-industrial contexts (an erotic story magazine, a typed text, an erotic photo magazine), all of which are intervened by scratching, gnawing, inaudible, peeling. Osvaldo Lamborghini defines himself as “the author of a single text” while producing a large number of plastic physical works, which were discovered in Barcelona a few years ago. The written and the visual seem to be separate domains. But for an “author of a single text” there is no contradiction between different artistic languages. And, although Lamborghini makes them all together, he remains an artist of a single, complete work.

In him, there is nothing better than “the painter who became a writer”, but a writing practice that began with his first poems and escalated in the last years of his life until it became an unwavering progress. “Author of a single text” means that behind each work there is a series of concepts that run through and intersect. Lamborghini assumes the existence of a non-specific text in the plastic arts. This case is similar to, but inversely, that of Alberto Greco, his unexpected but undeniable predecessor.

Exiled to Barcelona, ​​he lived in monastic isolation, producing all his plastic works in what he called his “little workshop”. For three years, between 1983 and 1985, he did not go out on the streets. There, locked in his apartment, he created the forty or so works that make up this exhibition, dating from 1984. His favourite medium is the pages of vintage porn and erotica magazines, in which the poses are comical and low-brow representations of what porn magazines seek to do, namely to ignite the desires of their readers.

All these materials were provided by his partner, Hanna Muck, who bought them in second-hand shops. Hanna also made sure to provide him with children’s items such as tempera paint, fiber, pens, pencils and glue. There was also whiskey, cognac and Shadow cigarettes, which they shared. Generally speaking, female attendants might appear in the lives of men, but Osvaldo Lamborghini is a special name. This man published a very unique text that gives the key to the title of the exhibition.

He was born in Buenos Aires in 1940. In his youth he was blessed and valued as the younger brother of the famous Peronist poet Leonidas Lamborghini. In 1967 he began to live in cheap hotels in the center of Buenos Aires, drifting from place to place and without a stable job. There, in those impersonal rooms, in the “troubles of hotel life” (a phrase of the author of Martín Fierro that Lamborghini constantly repeats), writing was born and he wrote his first book, El fiord, published in 1969 on the ghost press in the Chinatown of Edicines. During his life he published only three short books, which circulated secretly in the form of photocopies or hand-transmissions, which made him very early a marginal but adored writer.

In 1977, he published his most iconic poem, Die Verneinung. The second section is titled “Mother Hogarth,” referring to the English painter William Hogarth. One of the few direct quotations in her work, Sister Hogarth’s own song is so special that I’ll only quote the first stanza: “The clearer the lake is for you / Even if you believe / Full of plenty / Maybe remember me / I was your drug supplier.” Regarding the last line, the author affirms that the line “I was your drug supplier” is “not a comfort, but a prophecy of universal hope.”

Instead, the drug seems to be non-specific: it is any object that drags. The drug is the paper, the handwriting, the montage, the fragmentary work, it is the bodily fluids themselves as material, it is the compulsion, the inability to stop, the total dependence, the monastic devotion to the physical work that involves the whole body being thrown into the creation of art. In fact, there is a prophecy that means that the work is never finished, it is always coming. Lamborghini literally throws his body into the work. This is how he lives his life.

Since 1983, during those three years, in the “small workshop”, Lamborghini circulated throughout the department, starting production from the bed, its operating laboratory, but it was a laboratory from the time of the Lascaux caves, an anachronistic temporary, an ancient type of worker, like Paul Valery reading in Degas’ laboratory. In that bunker, he reached the deepest concentration, and in two years his works exceeded five hundred. Lamborghini died in November 1985 in his bed in the “small workshop” while working.

In 2015, his plastic works were exhibited for the first time at Macba in Barcelona, ​​in a space called Teatro Proletario de Cámara, curated by Valentí Roma. In 2018, part of the artist’s work participated in the Oscar Masotta exhibition Theory as Action, in the same museum. In 2023, the first major solo exhibition in Argentina was held at CCK, called Osvaldo Lamborghini. Material Scribe, curated by Paola Cortes Rocca and Agustina Perez.