• HERE ARE FEW THINGS ABOUT the Argentinean Emilio Pettoruti: a few mulatto paintings (among black and white), very architectural; paintings in rainbow colors, silky and light, fortissimo, flashy, compelling the harmonies; drawings and nudes and decorations… who knows? This sample [comes from] his exhibition at “Sturm” [Storm], Berlin.
• This great painter never repeats those lyrical moments in which he surprises even himself. Having many lives, his aesthetics always gives us the unexpected. . . . He is proud of his pure Italian blood, nevertheless— due to racial flexibility—he also wants to be criollo, as criollo to us as a plumed Indian or the great distant pampas that are seldom seen: our heritage.
• We, the neo-Criollos, will take up a bunch of what remains of the Southern Continent old nations, a river not dead tired but still very much alive in other forms; we will bring back the experiences of that age and all that our heterogeneous cultures have taught us, and above all the restless, individualistic, spiritual vigor of the times: the huge part of us. . . .
• These Pettorutian works, although they are so novel to our peoples, do not really belong to the fleeting present of what is Criollo; archaic instead, they belong to the past and, even more, to the richest future of this new world [to come].
• The sober monumental scale of pristine Native art is involved, as well as the idiosyncratic intensity of white modernity, and the paradoxical constructions (which are pure intellectual joy) of the hyper-creative era to come.
• It is difficult for an artist to be revolutionary. It does not suffice that he should shout along with the rest, or that he destroy his previous daub paintings. (We are not lawmakers). He must eschew superstitions (that is, imposed fashions). Surely, he must be strong enough to go against the current. If he is truly generative, his greatest father will always be his own God, not a foreign one.
• His work must proliferate—either within or outside of a paradigm,— when background, media, form, all [come] together to catch the rare gist of true originality, forever young and alive.
• Pettoruti’s innermost revolution is accomplished. What is next is a nexus guided only by himself.