Battistozzi, Ana María, “Miguel Harte: encanto y repulsión juntos” [Miguel Harte: Enchantment and repulsion together], Revista Ñ, May 27, 2022.
Complete text
Conceived as an installation, for the first time an exhibition brings together works by the artist from 1989 to the present. Magical worlds, insects and eroticism coexist on satin surfaces
The world—or rather the worlds—of Miguel Harte possess an enchantment that forces one to adjust perception to different scales. From the small drop that slides, almost imperceptible, on a white surface and the tiny winged beings enclosed in craters and bubbles, to the larger scale of animated trees—lamps—bugs, Harte's forms can disturb with their dark interior or fascinate with the overflow of a golden liquid like a tongue about to lick the spectator.
Rare enchantment from which it is difficult to escape. Something that pivots between the lyricism of his fairy worlds, the eroticism that throbs in the sensuality of the forms and can reach the grotesque seduction of a self-portrait as dominator: the garden gnome with a perverse smile.
One could say that since 1989, the starting point in the artist's production that encompasses the temporality of this exhibition, Harte's work has been seen in specific chapters. Never all together in its variety of materials, scales and approaches as it is seen now in the large compartmentalized room of Museo Coleccion de Arte Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat.
The grotesque seduction of the garden gnome with the perverse smile is at the core of the production. The grotesque seduction of the garden gnome with the perverse smile is at the core of the production.
The question activated the exhibition proposal of curator Santiago Villanueva in the sense of these aspects in the artist's work that he highlights by emphasizing differences in scale to the point of deliberately making the approach to the works uncomfortable. Especially those in which Harte creates minimum universes inside transparencies. Precisely pieces that demand attention adjusted to the measure of their scale. Impossible to access those inner worlds of ants, beetles pierced by small spears without submitting to a delayed act of contemplation that can yield the marvelous or the monstrous. This is what Harte's small artificial natures demand. They confront us with spaces that fascinate our gaze and at the same time can provoke feelings of repulsion. In this sense, Harte's work has been developing a growing complexity that we are given to observe in these transparencies as small vaults of wonders. From the initial tears-drops of the early 90s, located in the first instance, to the bubbles, craters and orifices with threatening contents about to overflow, these worlds not only demand special attention but it is difficult to imagine that any approach that aims to make it difficult.
Thus, the place occupied by the series Burbujas de vidrio such as Coral de abejas and Illuminati in the Museo Fortabat exhibition does not cease to surprise, literally cornered on the floor in a sector of the exhibition to the point of forcing the visitor to sprawl to access the surprising scenes inside.
Could it be that Santiago Villanueva sought to recreate in the visitor the perspective of the child observer of bugs, holes and weeds that fed Harte's imagination?
In the opposite angle, the display of animal lamp forms naturally imposes its presence without major difficulties. It gives the impression that the exhibition as a whole has been conceived by the curator as a large installation in which each piece by the artist functions as a part of his own design, beyond whether this contributes or not to the experience of certain works, as occurs particularly with those already mentioned. Visiting an exhibition implies being interested in its contents as much as opening oneself to the experiences proposed to the public. Hence, creative arbitrariness is welcome in a curation, as long as it does not conspire with the work itself, which is the raison d'être of any exhibition project.
Harte accepted this proposal that offers uncomfortable perspectives to the visitor. Because "it works as if it represented a great mental plane in which all the possibilities of my work are deployed," the artist admitted to Ñ. A task that is effectively fulfilled.
The arrangement of interior worlds is uncomfortable. On the right, Accidente domestico, 1999.
Especially regarding the multiple visions provided by the diverse scales and uses of materials applied with progressively imaginative and bold biases.
Oil on canvas, synthetic enamel, quail eggshell, polyester resin, formica, Martilux paint, plastic laminates, expanded polyurethane. Practically none of this refers to materials recognized as artistic. To this should be added Harte's pertinacious exploration that did not disdain incorporating a wide variety of insects. Nothing to envy an entomologist's collection. And all in function of a narrative logic that does not stop at the mere material question and only admits as north to expand the directions of a fantasy filled with curiosity and also eroticism as in Masa Cerebral, 2013. Two-layer paint on polyester resin with fiberglass, 92 x 30 x 40 cm.
Even faced with the abstract and purely material I tend toward a narrative—clarifies the artist—by mere ambition to give life to matter. A life that contemplates mutations of state and form. Something that is noticed in pieces like Materia cerebral a kind of gelatinous magma of satin tone that would seem about to slide from the place it occupies. Seduction and apprehension is what it provokes, a fairly frequent experience in this artist's production.
Thus from the first works in formica with little tears-drops, his imaginative impulse led him to include insects and strange beings with something human and something insect. And that world, which germinated inside the drops, came out into space.
The Jardin filosofico from 1993 was one of the first works in which the lyricism of Harte's interior worlds burst forth on a larger scale without losing any of its charm. A transparent pyramid endowed with an exterior of roots and an interior with a small lake, whose waters swirl and a small being that approaches. Polyester resin, formica, expanded polyurethane, the non-artistic materials that Harte uses.
It is a key piece in the leap into space that Harte made until reaching the dimensions of the rotund presence of Bicho-Agujero-Pozo from 2015.
The visions on a larger or smaller scale in each case were suggested by the very manipulation of the materials. True inspirers of forms halfway between science and fantasy. Thus the strange Criaturas that are born inside a tree can grow until they themselves become mollusk trees. All on a satin skin surface akin to an amusement park aesthetic.
Surfaces are and have been one of Harte's greatest concerns. From polished formicas and Martilux recreating seas with schools of strange beings that appear through craters and crevices.
In this sense, Harte's work has been inhabited from very early on by an infinity of holes and orifices that, as Santiago Villanueva points out, can refer to the anal. But much more so to those orifices and crevices that are formed among the weeds or inside the trees. Dark sites of mystery that can become a kind of dwelling for ants, dwarfs or giant slugs and worms. Such is what happens in the most recent works in the exhibition.
For them, Harte rescued some logs that he kept for years and turns them into a site invaded by slugs with satin skin that, once again, attract and repulse us in that return of the repressed that hovers over much of this artist's work.
Baulo, María Carolina. “No tan lejos del mundo de los humanos” [Never too far from mortal shores], Revista Ñ, December 31, 2016.
Complete text
Miguel Harte's work offers at least one certainty: the viewer will be induced to participate in a fantastic universe starring small organic beings that we commonly call Bichos. Treated as relics, sought, studied and preserved with zeal, Harte's creatures are organized in a kind of crystal capsules distributed in the Big Sur gallery room, building chapters of a book of micro-stories. Suspended in time, at a moment of their departure or arrival, sufficiently isolated from the spectators to be observed as pieces of a natural science museum, the insects detach themselves from that examining gaze as "objects of study" to adopt human qualities, attitudes, postures and actions.
Precious, obsessive and patient with detail, Miguel Harte unfolds a kind of cabinet of curiosities. The entire exhibition seems to follow the mathematical logic of fractals: the whole is perceived as an installation that integrates each of the works while they, individually, develop a new unit, complete in itself and as rich as the sum of the parts. Science fused with art, the exhibition The Exit presents a series of individual journeys by these pilgrim insects that seem to emerge from a dense and dark magma of resin spilled on the gallery floor. And as if that amorphous and dispersed stain were the origin of life itself, the tiny beings with humanoid characteristics then move to the walls, where they build their story submerged in a crystalline world.
Very influenced since childhood by Bosch's painting and science fiction films overpopulated with gigantic threatening insects—clear nods to the classics of cinema within the genre—Harte presents works made in 2015 with varied supports and materials. Thus, the small sculptures are composed of fiberglass, polyurethane foam, wood, epoxy putty, acrylic paint, pigmented polyester resin, iron and, of course, dissected insects. A journey through space toward the unknown in search of transcendental answers; a journey accompanied by memories that guide the symbolic path until materially transforming it into a work that speaks to us of everyday human situations, links we establish with the other, ordinary activities that define us as what we are. The identification process is as fast as the distancing effect because, clearly, no one wants to be represented by an insect. But they are simply the messengers.
Taking concepts from The Life of Insects by Russian writer Viktor Pelevin to approach his work, Harte manages to make the bugs acquire extreme humanity. However, this is not the first experience the artist develops in this field: "I have always brought the observation of nature with me, it doesn't just happen to me with insects. At the beginning of the 90s I began to develop points of attention in my work beyond the constant interruptions, alterations and disruptions in readings; the B side of my work appears: miniatures and small stories," says Harte.
A collector of insects who seeks to capture the attention of the viewer, to immerse them in a moment of suspense and attention. Of course, nothing escapes an interior reflection, a look at oneself and at humanity; a thought about the need to build, recreate, seek alternatives rests behind, in a word: resilience.
To enter, to exit, to keep moving. Such is the way these tiny bugs represent us who, even stopped in an instant, account for an action, an external search but, above all, a pause toward the interior to try to know our own nature. "I believe the leitmotif is man and what we believe we are... Given the uncertainty that Being generates in me, we could well be these bugs, not only with the monstrosity they culturally represent, but because of the ignorance we have of them and the fascination they exert," explains the artist.
In light of certain events that the human species protagonizes with alarming frequency, some spectator of the disturbing creatures of La salida might wonder who is the monster in this movie.
Miguel Harte
The Exit
Lebenglik, Fabián, “Los insectos como obra de arte” [Insects as an art piece], Página/12 newspaper, Buenos Aires, December 13, 2016.
La Salida, exhibition by Miguel Harte at Big Sur gallery.
The artist presents a series of strange works in which he includes dissected beetles with small transformations to give them human features. The obsession with the life of insects led him to collect them.
Partial view of Miguel Harte's exhibition at Big Sur gallery.
The attraction to the fantastic and science fiction has always been strong in the work of Miguel Harte (Buenos Aires, 1961), who now presents La Salida, a "chamber" exhibition in which he displays his world: dissected insects, alone or in groups, in attitudes and activities that cross the animal with the human.
Harte's work during the nineties and part of the 2000s condenses in the "inclusions" that the artist inserts as supposed accidents on polished, shiny, and deceptive surfaces, such as formica, first, and automotive and safe paint, later.
What at the beginning of the nineties was barely a tiny "inclusion," with the passage of time and the development of the work, becomes small included worlds, so that the drops transform into bubbles and spheres: into self-generated and self-sufficient worlds, in which a nature grows that combines the artificial and the dissected. There coexist strange creatures (hybrids between insects and humans) surrounded by an environment that suggests both the submarine and galactic hypothesis or that of some underworld. Any of these reveries functions as a microcosm. His work, of growing complexity, advanced toward the hypertrophy of "inclusions," like abysses opened from faults, craters, fissures, orifices, tunnels and other accidents that emerge under the protection of magmatic surfaces or, as in this case, the wall.
Thus, inclusions grow inward into the forms that contain them, or overflow those same forms, which can no longer serve as a container. In this sense, the idea of the "fault" as a rupture of a naturalized logic is notorious in several of his initial pieces. And the fault can be thought of as an irruption, both in the artist's language and in the viewer's gaze.
In the new exhibition he presents these days, most of the room is occupied by a puddle made of resin and river debris. From there emerge life forms, a kind of roots, where the vegetal crosses with the animal.
On the front wall is embedded a tree knot that forms a niche in which nests a family of enormous dissected beetles.
On the right side wall, small shelves hold glass spheres that contain resin forms in which other beetles "live."
The large coleoptera that Harte uses are transformed. In reverse to the Kafkaesque metamorphosis, in this case it is the insects that are becoming humanized: their legs are turned so that they articulate in reverse to their species; that is: in the manner of humans. And they have added little feet, very plausible. These mutations, at the same time that they make them more human, make them more monstrous.
In Harte's work there is a laboratory gaze, not only on insects but also on humans. And a work that goes back and forth from the insectization of the human to the humanization of insects.
Here is transcribed part of the interview conducted with the artist at the gallery.
—In the sheet given to visitors to the exhibition, a fragment from the novel The Life of Insects by the Russian cult writer Viktor Pelevin is quoted.
—The exhibition is called La Salida (The Exit), but it could also be "The Entrance." They are sometimes reversible concepts, taken from the work of Victor Pelevin, an author I had already used in a previous exhibition, in 2008. In that book the insects are mutating and living human lives. For example, they are smoking; or suddenly a giant footstep comes to crush them. Or a piece of gum that was stuck to the sole of a shoe passes almost over them and sticks to their side. Once you enter that world, the insects become familiar.
—When did you start including insects in your work?
—In 1992. And shortly after I started collecting them. I became friends with an entomologist, Javier Muzón, an authority in his field, professor in La Plata, who taught me to collect. He gave me collections of insects that his students had discarded. Since then I see insects differently. I realize that they look at me; how they interact, how they react. Insects pass by, look at you and continue. You see them and they see you.
—Did you capture them?
—Yes. And then I had to put them in a little envelope. The next step is to inject them with acetone. I collected and worked a lot with dragonflies. I really liked the wings, their shapes, the hardness, the enormous eyes, the antennae, the hairs, the head and the mouth apparatus, the abdomen, the colors... by observing them you get to know them. It affected me to kill them, to inject them. Because one establishes a kind of relationship with insects.
In 2004, Javier, together with a disciple, published an article in Science magazine in which he presents a discovery: a dragonfly that presents a difference in its sexual apparatus. So in homage to my interest, he baptized it with the name Acanthagrion Hartei.
—Insects interest you in relation to the human.
—Yes. And with the possibility of seeing ourselves associated with other forms of life. These are interests that go along with other questions, perhaps of an existential type, such as when one asks oneself who am I, how do I work. Or one also asks about memory, memories... and as time passes we undergo important changes. With the passage of time we are different, we transform, we question what we have learned; what we believed about things changes; what was useful for something now serves for something else; or it doesn't serve.
The insects in my work have something monstrous, but also something pitiful. And I think they also put the human in question. I place insects in familiar scenes.
—There are also scenes from "B-series" movies or references to certain mythologies.
—That work I did in the nineties, in which there is a dissected fly to which I had grafted a self-portrait with my head, took as reference the movie The Fly, the first version. And on the other hand, the beetle is the sacred animal of the ancient Egyptians.
—Each work seems to be the effect of a narration. And at the same time there is always something disruptive.
—I force insects to be part of a human scene. But I also feel that I narrate even when I am sanding, or in the simplest and most abstract attitude. As for the disruptive... the same thing happens with the human: You never know, there can always be an irruption of something else.
* At Big Sur gallery, Carlos Calvo 637, until the end of January.
Rubio Nomblot, Javier, “Cuadros hinchados” [Swollen Paintings], ABC, El Cultural, Madrid, April 16, 2005.
Complete text
Stephen King explains at the end of Dreamcatcher (2003) that such a nefarious book was written under difficult circumstances (the ineffable one usually concludes with this type of ode to the writer of hyper-sellers, mainly to leave a record of his new speed record), since apparently he was prey to a painful illness about whose nature he does not elaborate, although he assures that certain details slip into the novel that could put the savvy reader on the trail. He refers, of course, to the way in which the invading aliens—affectionately nicknamed "shit-bugs" by the terrestrial resistance—emerge from the body that had served as their incubator, causing in their passage some ravages that the prolific author describes with irritating meticulousness (never better said). And here is what is truly unpublishable: no sooner had I entered the book's first chapter, six hundred pages before knowing these painful and irrelevant facts, than I myself was prey to the mysterious ailment (like all the unfortunate readers of Dreamcatcher, I believe), which allowed me not only to dispose of the book in a couple of dismal nights (that's King's dubious work: that a terrible novel hooks you despite everything), but also to verify that nature imitates art, just as Arthur C. Clarke said happened when he discovered a sea on the Europa satellite before astronomers did (2010). I will say then that in the work of Miguel Harte (Buenos Aires, 1961) there is much science fiction and much humor (his finesse, by the way, contrasts with the roughness of what is displayed here), but, above all, a certain hemorrhoidal aftertaste, in the good sense of the word.
In the presentation text, this surprising artist, previously unknown in Spain, is defined as "a Pollock of underdevelopment who burst onto the Buenos Aires scene with a novel and personal technique called Martilux" (the fascinating catalog of his retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, 2002, deals with such an irruption, necessary to understand the exhibited work). I suspect there must be some relationship between this procedure and metallized automotive paint, so that in Harte's paintings converge textures of hammered sheet metal, metallic reflections, strange material labyrinths (hence the allusion to Pollock) and an unmistakably industrial smoothness.
With a Cockroach Head
In his most recent works (which are perhaps the best), this so perfectly smooth skin tends to become monochrome and the entire argument of the work revolves around the openings, soft and swollen, hairy at times, through which drops of transparent resin escape; in them our dear aliens hide, little men with cockroach heads (or vice versa), plus an immense tiny landscape whose orography and vegetation, abundant at this time of the sky, recalls that of Zxcvb. A little further on, the characteristic adipose Venusian lamps, the desert plains of mortified flesh, the wrinkled deformed foreskins, the enclosed and palpitating worlds, so many "features of a fatigued eroticism" and without concessions that wounds, dazzles and obsesses—I suppose especially the science fiction devourer—because it occupies the very antechamber of madness.
Neves, Manuel, “Extrañas formas, ambiguas poéticas”[Strange Forms, Ambiguous Poetics], Máscaras y Caretas magazine, Buenos Aires, July 8, 2003.
Complete text
[...]
CONSTRUCTING FABLES
Amid the confusion caused by the tragic theft of a Rodin work at the National Museum of Fine Arts, an anthological exhibition by Miguel Harte opened, one of the most personal artists to emerge in recent years on the neighboring shore. Despite having begun his career in the eighties, Harte is a typical artist of the nineties. Together with Fabio Kacero, Alfredo Londaibere, and Sebastián Gordín, he forms a group of artists who work in silence producing a powerfully original and almost impossible to classify work. Fundamental in contemporary Argentine art, despite the fact that his work is not in tune with the prevailing international taste.
The excellent selection presented in Visual Arts, of fifteen years of his work, very well mounted and illuminated (something infrequent in this museum room), shows Harte's work in its totality. His obsession with insects, with their dissection and preservation. The autobiographical winks, which are comfortably integrated into his work, permanently characters from his family and personal environment. His formal quality, which links materials foreign to art, such as hammered paint (Martilux in Argentina) and nitrocellulose lacquer (two-layer paint), which are used in industry to paint machinery and automobiles.
Harte's works produce an uncontrollable seduction. One can see for the first time his evolution from irony and humor to parody and fable. From a Rojas aesthetic (1) of shine, decoration, and hedonism, to ambiguous narratives, between drama and humor. Harte interweaves biography with fable, generating a necessary complicity with the viewer, where insects and other living beings less defined in their species appear as characters in strange stories. Laura Batkis says: "The perverse scene encapsulated in a microcosm captures the spectator with the velvety sensuality of the material, which the artist now works with greens, purples, opaque and satin colors, turning these works into paintings that ask to be touched, caressed, like the disturbing skin of a surface of pleasure."(2)
Thus, the glossy surface of the painting is a skin that hides more than it shows. This formless skin, like a thick liquid in ebullition, lets bubbles escape where the stories develop. The approach to each of Harte's works occurs in gradual moments that inevitably end in closeness, almost putting one's nose to the painting. In that process the history of the work, the one that is being narrated, is discovered. The spectator easily enters a kind of reverie and attends a staged spectacle, where one does not know (or it is not possible to define) the drama or the comic, although without doubt a parodic tone hovers at all times. And the artist obliges us—finally—to be voyeurs, without ethical or moral remorse of any kind.
STRANGE NATURE
Nature appears as an artificial, controllable and manipulable construction, which integrates perfectly into Harte's private world. It is also about nature as a source of inspiration and information. It permanently raises the ambiguity between the organic and the artificial, as in Los gusanos de piedra, in which three strange worms, each with one eye, come out into the open after breaking a stone wall, which is actually made of formica.
Harte's work hides more than it shows, and what is hidden will never be shown, but we can still intuit what it is about. A metaphor for other concealments, which we know we will never discover. A drama with which we live eternally. In La Mosca, 1991, ambiguity gives way to humor: a group of flies is trapped in water spilled on an ordinary folding table. One of them is a caricatured portrait of the artist. This work, influenced by Pablo Suárez's aesthetic, destroys possible existential complexes, crushing them with irony and humor. In one of his first achievements in works in space, El Gordiplan Hartico, 1995, plays in the title with the surname of his friend, the artist Sebastián Gordín, and his own. It also anticipates the Matrix psychosis so fashionable in these times. In a white ball a conspiracy develops that can be observed through some holes; we don't know if it is a macabre game or the hive of some strange insect. The doubt that borders on drama is always aided by humor and irony. Without doubt, the most beautiful and highest quality works, those that demonstrate the maturity achieved by the artist, are the 'tree sculptures'. Accidente domestico, 1999, shows a scene in which three characters—the artist and his closest family—contemplate, perplexed and fearful, how the branch of the tree they inhabit mutates and transforms from a crystalline sphere into a strange liquid. Tenderness is present in this excellent work. In Lampara esquinera, meanwhile, one of the most recent works in the exhibition and, without doubt, one of the most suggestive, we see a young tree with barely two branches that end in fruits, shaped like bubbles. One fulfills the function of illuminating, as the title of the work indicates; the other is a glass bubble inside which we observe a muscular green dragonfly (Hulk-style) emerging from its cave. It looks annoyed and observes us. We uncomfortably realize that we are interrupting something: its rest, its sleep, or a love act. The scene freezes in time, transpires but has no end; we barely see an image as in a film frame. In this moment of uncertainty, humor does not help: the same thing happens as when we make a mistake and compensate for the embarrassment with a pathetic smile.
Notes: (1) Generalizing, 'Rojas' is known as the aesthetic and taste of a group of artists who exhibited and circulated through the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center, of the University of Buenos Aires, which from the end of the eighties until 1997 was coordinated by the artist Gumier Maier. (2) The Language of Parody, by Laura Batkis, Lápiz Magazine 158/159, Spain.
Lebenglik, Fabián, “El hombre de la burbuja” [The Man of the Bubble], Página/12 newspaper, Buenos Aires, June 10, 2003.
Complete text
The National Museum of Fine Arts presents in two of its ground-floor rooms—and a distribution hall—a retrospective anthology of Miguel Harte (1961)—a characteristic artist of the nineties—covering the period 1989-2002 and curated by Patricia Rizzo.
Harte's work—fundamentally objects, of all sizes—initially condenses in the "inclusions" that the artist inserts as supposed accidents within the fabric of deceptive surfaces such as formica, first, and Martilux automotive paint, later.
What at the beginning of the nineties is barely a tiny inclusion like a transparent tear that bursts into the formica, with the passage of time and Harte's artistic growth, develops until becoming tiny included worlds, so that the drops transform into bubbles and spheres: microscopic self-generated and self-sufficient worlds, in which an entire artificial nature grows, where strange creatures (hybrids between insects and humans) coexist surrounded by an environment that suggests both the submarine and intergalactic hypothesis. Either of the two reveries functions as a microcosm.
From the initial tears Sin titulo, 1991, passing through the transparent resin that, as an accidental spill on a folding formica table, contains a fly La mosca, 1991, to the bubbles that gain in size and become independent from the surfaces that contain them to emerge as enormous autonomous worlds El jardin filosofico, 1998, Harte's work is of growing complexity, advancing toward the hypertrophy of "inclusions," like abysses opened from faults, craters, fissures, orifices, tunnels, and other accidents that emerge under the protection of magmatic surfaces.
The inclusions grow inward into the forms that contain them, or overflow those same forms, which can no longer serve as a container.
Harte's incrustations are clearly disruptive. In this sense, the idea of the "fault" as a rupture of a supposedly eternal and naturalized logic is notorious in the piece La quebrada, 1997, in which the fault is put into operation as a linguistic irruption.
Always in his work bubbles are born that appear on the apparently impenetrable surface of formica or automotive paint. Harte proposes a closed fabric, apparently impenetrable, that offers itself as a deceptive visual fabric. If the work ended there, "only" there would be to see a set of subtle variations, chromatisms, and undulations, obtained by the manipulation of the material. On those surfaces a falsification aesthetic is played out, in which all supposed nobility (of metal, for example) is replaced by imitations.
But what for Harte could have meant the discovery of a material (which allows him an industrial finish) is in reality a trap for the eye, a sought-after imposture. The magmatic materiality and, as advertisements say, the "covering" power of that kind of paint, serve as the sweet aroma—the striking color or the disturbing forms—of carnivorous plants to attract insects. Precisely, many of Harte's bubbles are inhabited by rare insects.
The small—and then not so small—worlds encapsulated in bubbles look like the materialization of obsessive and recurrent delirious fictions. The relationship between Miguel Harte and Sebastián Gordín must also be noted—two works in the exhibition recover this exchange of poetics: both microcosms complement and feed back on each other.
Harte's incrustations usually contain asphyxiated self-portraits of the one who, with spiral and bulging eyes, finds himself trapped in foreign bodies. They are worlds on an infinitely small scale, which include complete cosmogonies within the framework of a reinvention of nature where new and strange vegetables, animals, and minerals proliferate. The detail and meticulousness of those small worlds is as astonishing as it is delicate: in the midst of those plants and rocks, deeply introspective stories develop, as if the artist were manufacturing an insect of the Harte family and from that creature generating an appropriate habitat to contain it, beginning with the amniotic atmosphere and organic food. In this sense, Miguel Harte's pieces seem to chain together as if they were part of a new theory of biological evolution.
In El Jardin filosofico—a large-scale work—an enormous transparent pyramid supported by roots gives life to an idyllic and strange landscape, at whose center rises a tree and at its foot there is a lake—with water that is set in motion at regular intervals. In the tree's crown grow clusters with tiny faces, while an insect-Narcissus contemplates its mirrored image in the lake.
Dreams of liberation or asphyxiating and Dantesque nightmares, collective and private utopias, as time passes, the growing inclusions become autonomous to the point of—literally—radicalizing themselves: that is, transforming into giant plants and roots that, like vegetation from another planet, grow until they contain renewed inclusive formations: other bubbles, as part of an infinite story that reproduces itself inevitably to make its way toward new dreams, nightmares, and utopias.
Montequin, Ernesto, “El extraño mundo de Miguelito” [The Strange World of Miguelito], Pagina/12, Suple. Radar weekly newspaper, Buenos Aires, November 15, 1998.
Complete text
For quite some time, the world of Miguel Harte (who was born in Buenos Aires in 1961) was a hermetic and asphyxiating place formed by frigid seas of pictorial protoplasm (which, in reality, was Martilux, an industrial paint used to paint safes) from which emerged transparent bubbles inhabited by tiny homunculi with priapic protuberances and bulging eyes. They were minimal and enigmatic scenes that captured the eye (that "cannibal delicacy," as Bataille defined it in a happy distortion of a phrase by Stevenson) in its compulsive search without offering it any other reward than the furtive pleasure of its own indiscreet ferocity. Surrounded by his latest production, which is exhibited at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery until the end of November, Harte admits that the metaphorical overexposure of aspects of his own life in his previous works culminated in a kind of autobiographical claustrophobia. "I realized that there was no more development in those works. They were like a dead end. I was more expectant, more absorbed and fearful of advancing in other directions. Getting out of the autobiographical is a relief," he confesses.
Fortunately, Harte's world, like ours, is subject to sudden and capricious mutations, and in this case the metamorphosis gave rise to a desire to tell small stories starring a fantastic fauna, apparently escaped from the nightmares of a nineteenth-century naturalist. "Beneath the work I had been doing until now there was a narrator. It's something very strange for me, I don't know if I'm doing it well or badly, and I didn't think I was going to enjoy it. But it's coming out on its own. And I like it. Before I built small scenes that one didn't know very well what they meant. Perhaps the change is due to the fact that I had to move on to something else so that those scenes would assume the main role within the work."
Dangerous Relationships
Harte's first contacts with contemporary art anticipate the usual initiatory rites of every budding artist: at the end of the 1960s, in the midst of Di Tella euphoria, his father opened the Vignes gallery together with Julio Llinás, where artists such as Berni, Suárez, Roberto Jacoby, Oscar Bony, and Emilio Renart exhibited. Located on Florida street near Av.Corrientes, the gallery accommodated new conceptual experiences that were gestating at that time, and managed to survive two or three years without selling practically a single painting. "I remember going when I was six or seven years old. It was a huge space that didn't look like a gallery. Pablo Suárez exhibited a purely conceptual work (I think it was about ten thousand stacked newspapers) but I suppose at that time I couldn't appreciate it as art. The relationship with Pablo began at that time. Later my father became very close friends with him and they had other projects together, and he installed himself as a kind of uncle or second father," says Harte. Twenty years after that oblique and symbiotic kinship, to which Marcelo Pombo was added, a kind of rule of three emerged that irreversibly disrupted the opaque arithmetic of Argentine art in the early nineties. Harte recognizes that Suárez's is an influence barely contaminated by anguish: "At first perhaps yes, because I felt that I had been following him a lot and it took me quite a bit to detach myself from him. Later I separated myself quite a bit from his image, and now I like to find things of Pablo (I refer to certain formal resolutions) or of other artists that I love very much, like Gordín or Pombo. When they appear I preserve them, I assimilate them... and I protect them," he adds.
An Epic in Miniature
In many of his latest works, Harte uses battle scenes between insects and other beings of monstrous anatomy that could be grouped under the title "Scenes of the Struggle for Survival." Suspicious of any defined intention and any univocal meaning, Harte clarifies that these battle scenes have no definite connotation or message, but simply function as episodes of a cruel and ambiguous narration that allows reconstructing the secret epic of a future prehistory. That nature in a state of fermentation (which Harte seems to have used after verifying that its expiration date has passed) captive in clots populated by polyps, indefinable organisms and minerals, overflows through gashes and perforations inflicted on the pristine surfaces bruised by the traces of an interior combat. (To achieve this effect, Harte uses a polyester paint applied with a blowtorch on a wooden support that he must sand endlessly until he manages to imprint contusions and dents on them).
Art and ArtificeUntil now, Harte was not accustomed to titling his works. El Jardin filosofico [The philosophical garden] is a laborious exception that took him four months of work. On a small rocky but vaguely organic platform emerges a carnal tree, furrowed by veins and covered with tiny vaginas and penises. Its crown is formed by clusters of microscopic faces, plunged into an inscrutable ecstasy. At the foot of this tree opens a lake full of a viscous and metallized liquid, in whose center there is a whirlpool that dangerously attracts a little man leaning on the shore with a colorful insect shell. The iconographic filiation of the scene does not exhaust its enigma or its innocence, made strange by its allusions, since it is a celebratory appropriation of one of the myths of traditional alchemy: the legendary Arbol de la vida in which the masculine and feminine unite with all their binary and symbolic repertoire (the sun and the moon, gold and silver, etc.) and which guards among its roots a lake of mercury, a mythical substance whose possession grants knowledge of all the mysteries of the universe and also the ability to transmute metals into pure gold. Although Harte claims to have taken the alchemical image as a purely visual trigger for the work, the choice betrays his will to subject nature and its laws to the arbitrariness of artifice. These microcosms populated by carnal vegetations, minerals of visceral appearance and hyperreal and fantastic beings at the same time (Harte confesses that he often uses real insects, or parts of them, to create the bizarre anatomy of his characters) exude an elusive and indefinable mystery. The American poet Marianne Moore, with an unobjectionable oxymoron, unknowingly defined the effect produced by Harte's works when she declared that the poet's labor was to create imaginary gardens inhabited by real toads.
Battistozzi, Ana María, “Delirante mundo artificial” [Delirious Artificial World], Clarín newspaper, Buenos Aires, November 7, 1998.
Complete text
More than a century ago, when the Industrial Revolution began to show the first signs of what enlightened reason called progress, artists—especially the Romantics—took refuge in an idealized natural world that they made responsible for the melancholy that this course of events provoked in them. Since then, industry and nature have never gotten along well.
Over the centuries, the struggle settled into known results: little remains of that old and longed-for natural world. Every organic material finds its equivalent today in an industrial product: plants, stone, wood, skin, flowers, or marble reach us in seductive falsifications that seem to speak of a dispute settled in favor of the artificial.
This is, apparently, the comfortable terrain on which Miguel Harte's work has unfolded in recent years: at the opposite pole from romantic sensibility. However, not everything is calm on the finely finished surfaces of his industrial paintings. In the depths of his seas of pearlescent enamel, the rumor of a whirlpool loaded with threats has been stirring for some time. Revealed little by little in craters and gashes, that underground latency has been threatening to burst forth in a confused torrent of stones, algae, and small vermin.
The Domain of Fiction
One might say that this is the particular way in which Harte's work refracts the insoluble antagonisms of reality. It does not announce or represent them, it makes them emerge in its internal fabric converted into metaphor. But it has reached the point of liberating them by expelling them from the neat channel of its exterior appearance.
In this latest exhibition of his at Ruth Benzacar Gallery (Florida 1000), his natures, until recently imprisoned and kept as relics, overflow to achieve an autonomy of reverie. They have finally abandoned their microscopic burrows, illuminated with dubious glows, to achieve their own light in the domains of fiction. A flight to the territories of imagination that nevertheless does not nullify the tensions; it simply transfers them to another space where the struggle continues between winged beings, born from copulations of men and insects. A tiny fairy world nests in bells and crystal bubbles while a pearlescent tree, with multiple faces and roots that never stop growing, improvises an open spectacle for whoever wants to settle into it.
Gaston Bachelard said that the miniaturizing imagination belongs to all times and appears in the dreams of natural dreamers. Thus, he also recalled that prisoner who drew on the wall of his cell a tunnel and a small train on which, making himself small, he climbed to disappear into the darkness before the mocking gaze of his jailers. "One must surpass logic to live the greatness that exists within the small," he concluded his story.
Like Bachelard's prisoner, these latest works by Harte surpass the spurious logic of the industrial fake and convert it into dream material. They populate it with fantastic visions that extend the frontiers of the real. In them coexist mythological beings, tree-men and mirrors of agitated waters that recreate impossible stories. In his "El Jardin filosofico," nature, conceived as pure artifice, acquires the expansive force of delirium. It is no longer a double, but something that has a life of its own; that has grown in the dynamics of excess and ended up breaking the external rigors of form.
Grinstein, Eva, “El silencio sirve a un simbolismo tan ambiguo como profundo” [Silence Serves a Symbolism as Ambiguous as it is Profound], El Cronista newspaper, Buenos Aires, November 4, 1998.
Complete text
It is not at all bad that Miguel Harte chooses silence to present his works to society: his constructions, decidedly narrative, possess sufficient elements to impose themselves, and it would almost be an abuse for the artist to try to control that wide possibility of meanings. In Harte's work, titles are of no interest—they are practically non-existent—barely one stands out that points to the paradigmatic work of the exhibition, titled El Jardin filosofico. This work contains and magnifies the "Harte details," the irruption of presumably organic forms in contexts of industrial matter. That Harte's fauna, flora, and humanoids are also made with industrial materials does not deny this relationship: he knows when to make a background—perhaps a landscape, as in El Jardin filosofico—and when to taint it with the presence of something that appears to be alive.
To build his personal plastic idea of the living, the artist develops a thought in which a conflictive dialectic is established about the diminutive in its relationship with a larger space. With their well-defined features, beings and plants oppose with their rich ambiguity the evident monotony of an overwhelming environment. To stand out, to make themselves visible, the characters brandish all their insignificant particularities, which can take the form of wings, little legs, arms, hair. The fact that they are so small, that they seem to have no place on those smooth surfaces on which they burst, is irrelevant. What matters is that they carry with them their nuances, what makes them different.
Harte reveals little naivety in the disposition of his figures, perhaps that is why it bothers him that at 37 years old they still label him a "young artist," as if he were still safe from the passage of years. In the passage of years, without doubt, he has carved out his style, until becoming one of the most laborious and profound artists in current Argentine art. His wall works, which are not strictly paintings because they incorporate diverse inclusions, also function at times as paintings in which the sense of composition establishes—an echo of Fontana—where and how to make the cut. However, what happens inside those cuts, the emergence of violent, confused, chaotic, and even sexual scenes, is what seems to concern the artist.
There are those who see in Harte's creations an apocalyptic symbolism in which Nature is confined in hollows of oppressive seclusion. But also, peering into those hollows, it is possible to understand that there is in his work a hopeful vision, which could be conceived as the stubborn resistance of the small, sheltered in their minimal qualities, no matter how monstrous they may be. Fortunately, Harte does not make his position explicit.