María Freire y José Pedro Costigliolo
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry (MACA)
ArtNexus, #121 (Dec - May 2024)

María Freire (1917-2015) and José Pedro Costigliolo (1902-1985) were an Uruguayan artist couple. Understanding their work requires seeing it and their life in a vital dialog; one is inseparable from the other. This is the intention—and to a large degree, the achievement—of the exhibition María Freire y José Pedro Costigliolo: una relación constructiva (María Freire and José Pedro Costigliolo: A Constructive Relationship), curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, in Maldonado department, Uruguay.

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In Costigliolo’s early works, dating from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, a figurativism along the lines of Uruguay’s planista school coexists with several compositions and still lifes in the cubist mode. Freire’s early works, meanwhile, date from the 1940s (she was 15 years Costigliolo’s junior) and are a series of sculptures inspired by African and Oceanian masks, with some geometric features.

The couple met in 1951, at Uruguay’s first exhibition of non-figurative art, held at the Facultad de Arquitectura in Montevideo. Along with Freire and Costigliolo, the roster of participants included Rhod Rothfuss, Guiscardo Améndola, Antonio Llorens, Oscar García Reino, Julio Verdi, and Juan Ventayol.

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It was in fact in the 1950s that Freire and Costigliolo had their closest connection with Argentina’s Madí and Arte Concreto Invención groups. In that period, their artistic production was notably similar, to the point that authorship becomes indiscernible between the two in some instances. These works partake of a markedly industrial or mechanical aesthetic; Freire and Costigliolo even used a pyroxylin varnish for finishes that erase all traces and gestures. They adopted an exclusively geometric artistic language, based on lines and simple figures against flat-color grounds.

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In their work, Freire and Costigliolo sought to distance themselves from the artistic production of their Uruguayan contemporaries, including from the powerful influence exerted by Joaquín Torres García with his Constructive Universalism. Against this current, Freire and Costigliolo preferred a connection with international styles: Abstract and Concrete art made it possible for them to align their work with European and Latin American referents closer to their interests: Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, George Vantongerloo, among others in Europe; Tomás Maldonado, Judith Lauan, and Geraldo de Barros in Latin America.

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Between 1959 and 1962, influenced by the informalism of the period, Freire and Costigliolo developed a series of matteric works that broke with the neat geometric forms of the previous decade and incorporated sand and other materials. This allowed them to experiment with a more expressive and organic language. In these works, we can see that a connection with matter and volume was more accessible to Freire than to Costigliolo, given her original training in sculpture (a practice she set aside once she began to share a studio with her husband, to avoid disturbing him).

Their work began to find their respective individualized languages in 1963, when they are able to explore their personal preoccupations in greater depth, albeit always in dialog and mutual support.

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Costigliolo will then delve deeper in his series Rectángulos y cuadrados (Rectangles and Squares), to which he’ll later add triangles, on square supports; at times he produced serene compositions and at times, more thunderous ones. The same occurs with the outlines and boundaries of these figures—some linear a well-ordered, others more irregular—and the grounds around them. The entire series, which is truly copious and extended over two decades, breathes rhythm and compositional musicality, be it in sharper or graver tones, at a faster or slower tempo, as if each item could be associated with a specific melody. There is in all instances a marked dynamism and a careful balance. Interestingly, Costigliolo played classical music as he painted.

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Freire, for her part, was to devote herself to the production of open, interconnected, and fluid abstract forms that resonate with a variety of ancestral iconographies, especially in the series Córdoba and Capricornio (Capricorn), which to a certain degree hark back to the shapes in her earlier series Sudamérica (South America). In Freire’s work, shapes are cut out against the ground, with a certain interplay of fittings and motions between them; there is in many cases a pronounced verticality, sometimes provided by the ground by means of bands of color. Freire possessed a profound mastery of color, be it cold or warm, something in even greater evidence in her series Variantes (Variants) and Vibrantes (Vibrants).

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After Costigliolo’s passing, Freire returned to working with volumes. By then, she was somewhat limited physically, which made the task enormously difficult; she leaned on assistants and students to execute the works according to her designs. Once again, we find in her sculptures those sequences of connected forms that generate columns or different volumes of fluid depths.

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In the three decades by which she survived her husband, María Freire revisited her earlier, more concrete work of the 1950s, while at the same time managing Costigliolo’s legacy and her own. The couple’s artistic explorations received limited recognition until the first decade of the twenty-first century. Since then, however, their contribution to modern art in Uruguay and Latin America has been the object of increased appreciation. To date, María Freire’s work has garnered more accolades than her husband’s, and is now included in collections of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Art (MNCARS), among others.