Domingo Guccione (1898 – 1966): Rhythmic Abstraction: Gallery Two • In-Person and Online

12 December 2024 - 15 February 2025

Born in Buenos Aires to Italian parents, Domingo Guccione's journey into art was unconventional and deeply personal. A trained classical guitarist and instructor, Guccione lived much of his life immersed in music rather than the visual arts. Remarkably, despite his color blindness and lack of formal training, he produced an extraordinary series of works characterized by their intricate interplay of geometric forms and restrained palettes. Working privately and describing his process as channeling a "mysterious force," Guccione created over 200 artworks between 1930 and 1955. He relied solely on graphite, colored pencils, thick paper, and a small wooden straightedge to craft his kaleidoscopic compositions.

Rhythmic Abstraction situates Guccione within the larger context of geometric abstraction, a movement that flourished across Latin America during the mid-20th century. While luminaries such as Joaquín Torres-García and the artists of the Madí Group were formalizing the principles of abstraction, Guccione’s private explorations ran parallel, untouched by the conventions of academic discourse or artistic collectives. His work recalls the optimism of modernist architecture, while its labyrinthine complexity suggests a world in flux—evoking the turbulent interwar years and the postwar period, when global shifts in culture, science, and politics inspired new ways of seeing and creating.

Unlike his peers, Guccione’s drawings were not the product of theory or manifesto but of intuitive and meditative practice. Each work offers a fresh perspective on the utopian ideals of the time, reimagining them in forms that are at once intricate and enigmatic, grounded and transcendent, through spatial tensions that echo broader developments in global abstraction, linking Guccione’s private visions to a universal language of geometric expression.

After remaining unknown to the art world for decades, Guccione’s work first came to light with a sold-out booth at the Independent Art Fair New York in 2020. Rhythmic Abstraction features several works that have never been exhibited before.