The works belong to the Nueva Figuración (New Figuration) period—a group he co-founded in 1961 alongside Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció, and Jorge de la Vega—and his quest to bridge the gap between figuration and abstraction through aesthetics that used all available expressive means to create his own language. They also foreshadow the notions that Noé developed in his first book: Antiestética (1965), where he proposed chaos as a structure for understanding the broad pictorial repertoire. Dripping, drawing, collage, and cut-out frames became urgent procedures for a production that embraced excess, imbalance, and loss of center as constitutive instances of vitality.
Influenced by his perception of the surrounding reality and political struggles in Argentina and the world, Noé saw chaos as “another order,” a vital and generative force in constant transformation. This “aesthetic of chaos” is reflected in his fragmented vision of the world in pursuit of constant change and in the rupture of the concept of unity in painting. Noé radically questioned traditional painting by using collages, materials foreign to canvas, and attached, inverted, or cut-out frames. His installations extended the pictorial work into space, seeking to immerse the viewer in chaos. He also integrated writing into his works, complementing his visual practice with profound theoretical reflection.
“The realization that I had only accepted chaos with reassurance, immersed in an enveloping atmosphere, when the world around me offered me nothing but tension and rupture as a spectacle, led me to speak of broken vision, divided picture, and, for the first time consciously, of the acceptance of chaos.”, wrote the artist himself.
More information available at the Noé Foundation website.
