Ollin

Eduardo Mac Entyre and Miguel Ángel Vidal

CircunferenciasFocos
CircunferenciasFocos

Eduardo Mac Entyre (Buenos Aires, 1929 to 2014) and Miguel Ángel Vidal (Buenos Aires, 1928 to 2009) were two painters who, in 1959, gave their work a name nobody had used for art before: Arte Generativo. They had shared a studio in the early 1950s and the Grupo Joven, where they studied concrete art, Max Bill, Georges Vantongerloo, and the Bauhaus. Mac Entyre was self-taught and came from industrial and graphic design; his first show was in 1954 at the Galería Comte, the firm of the brothers Ignacio and Ricardo Pirovano. Vidal trained at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón school of fine arts, graduating in 1952 under Lino Enea Spilimbergo and Eugenio Daneri.

The name came from the collector Ignacio Pirovano, who took it from Vantongerloo's idea of a work of art as a generator of new forms. The first exhibition ran from September 7 to 21, 1960, at the Galería Peuser on calle Florida, organized by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, whose own building was not yet open, and presented by its director Rafael Squirru. The catalogue carried a manifesto. In it the two wrote that they had taken concrete art's "small point and that line as our starting point but allowed them movement, we have ENGENDERED movement". A glossary followed. Generative was "that which has the capacity to engender". A generator was "the line or figure that by its movement engenders in its turn a different or new geometric body". The term, they wrote, should not become one more limiting label; it should take in every future and legitimate search that engenders new beauty. The word did not mean then what it means now. The generation was the painter's hand, moving one form one step at a time, and the computer came into their work only in 1969, when Vidal had plotter drawings made on an IBM 1130 at the ORT schools' computing center and both joined the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética.

Mac Entyre's generator was the circle. He drew one with a compass on tracing paper, drew it again with its center moved a little, and again, the same step every time, until the family closed on itself or ran out, and then painted the sheet onto canvas with fine tools. Where two families cross, the thin lines beat against each other and a flat disc reads as a sphere, a lens, or a flower. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought Generative Painting: Black, Red, Orange (1965) through its Inter-American Fund; he had won the UNESCO prize at the São Paulo Biennial in 1961 and the national painting prize at the Instituto Di Tella in 1966, and he was in MoMA's Latin-American Art, 1931 to 1966 (1967) and Beyond Geometry at the Center for Inter-American Relations (1968). Vidal's generator was the straight line. Slid parallel to itself by one step, it rules a face, and four faces of nested chevrons meeting at a point raise the squares of his Homenaje a Albers (1967) into a pyramid. Turned about a point by one angle, it makes a fan, and where the fan's lines are densest the canvas seems to give off light, which is the title of Focos de luz (1969), now in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, whose composition was based on a computer-generated drawing. His screenprint of that year from a plotter drawing of a triangle turned about four points was shown at Arte y Cibernética at the Galería Bonino in August 1969 and at Tendencies 5 in Zagreb in 1973, and is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1972 the two showed Proyección y dinámica at the Museo de Arte Moderno with Ary Brizzi and Carlos Silva, and the show traveled to the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Vidal went on to direct the Pueyrredón school from 1989 to 1991 and to teach painting at the Ernesto de la Cárcova school. Mac Entyre's retrospective Sutilezas de la línea, curated by María Cristina Rossi, filled the four floors of MACBA in Buenos Aires from October 2017 to March 2018, and her book of the same name reprints the manifesto. The Museo de Arte Moderno holds their generative paintings through the 1980 Pirovano donation, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes holds Mac Entyre's Tramas (1961 to 1964). In 2025 the Fondo Nacional de las Artes showed forty of their works at the Casa Victoria Ocampo as Arte generativo: el futuro a crear.

They belong in this set because the first art to call itself generative was built by hand from one rule: a form, and a constant step. The two sketches here keep exactly that. Each family is a generator and its step, the pictures export as the circles and lines they are, and reading the file gives the step and the count back.

Learn more:

Recreations here

  • Circunferencias: families of circles, after Mac Entyre's generative paintings of 1965 to 1970. A disc holds families families, each one radius and one generator. A ring generator sets the circles with their centers at one distance from the middle, one constant angle apart, as many as close the turn, so a family passes through the middle and touches the rim as a rosette. A path generator walks the centers along one straight line, one constant step apart, so a family makes a lobe. look picks the 1967 red disc with its white rim on green, the 1970 purple band on black, or the 1965 clover of red and orange lobes. Over one cycle of seconds every ring family turns by exactly one of its own steps and every path family slides one step along its line, its first circle fading in and its last out, so the picture flows and comes back to itself. The seed deals the picture and a press deals the next. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings and the manifesto's glossary; there is no code to port, the work is a compass on tracing paper.
  swift run Example-Recreations-MacEntyreVidal-Circunferencias

Every circle comes back as a circle at its family's radius, so the families can be read from the file: a ring family's centers at one distance from the middle, one angle apart, their count closing the turn; a path family's centers on one line, one step apart:

  swift run Example-Recreations-MacEntyreVidal-Circunferencias --seed 1 --export-svg circles.svg --frame 200
  • Focos: families of straight lines, after Vidal's Focos de luz (1969) and Homenaje a Albers (1967). The seed deals an octagon with a vertex at the top, the bottom, and the two sides, and a lit corner between each pair. Its four faces run from an outer vertex through two corners to the middle, and each is ruled with chevrons parallel to its outer edges, one step apart, as many as fit before the middle, so the faces meet as a pyramid seen from above. At each corner a fan of rays lines opens across part of the corner's own angle, a constant angle apart, every line running until it leaves the two faces that meet there; a second light part of the way in along each diagonal opens a fan of its own. look picks white and gold on the 1969 blue, white and orange on black, or pale lines on violet. Over one cycle of seconds the chevrons advance toward the middle by one step, the outermost fading in and the innermost out, and every fan sweeps by one of its own steps the same way. A press deals the next body. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings; there is no code to port, the work is a ruling pen and a fine brush.
  swift run Example-Recreations-MacEntyreVidal-Focos

The body comes back as a polygon and every line as a line at its own two ends: the chevrons of a face parallel to its outer edges one step apart, their ends on the face's axis and inner edges, and the lines of a fan all leaving one point one angle apart and ending on an outline:

  swift run Example-Recreations-MacEntyreVidal-Focos --seed 1 --export-svg lines.svg --frame 200

This is a homage after Eduardo Mac Entyre and Miguel Ángel Vidal, made for learning. It isn't a reproduction of a specific work, and it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the artists or their estates.

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