In a world full of painters, Nordlinger paints

Writing about someone who paints, is, in my opinion, a cyclopean and futile task. All the words that would adorn such a piece of writing would do no more than brush against his world, degrading it, distorting it or, in any case, forming an allegory incapable of giving our eyes something that shows him as he deserves. Therefore, either out of conviction or impossibility (in this case they are synonyms), I am not going to talk about Nordlinger’s work, I will only try to briefly review some events that could be useful for those who do not know him, to make them realise that his work should be taken into account, especially because he is an artist of singular power in these times, when it is rare for a painter to emerge among the hundreds and thousands of them who want to occupy a prominent place in the immense population of Argentine plastic arts.
Juan Nordlinger came into my life in 1995 as the result of an interesting “experiment” that La Cárcova tried to consolidate over a more or less long period. At that time, a wonderful and chimerical world opened up for him, where every little epiphany is followed by a surprise, resulting from the laborious manipulation of unknown and unfriendly materials. At the time, Juan thought he had found the right person to help him format his identity and began to visit my studio once a week, not knowing that he was the only creative device responsible for his own universe and that I was just someone drifting along in search of a needy person fishing for a signifier. What is only now beginning to emerge in his work was glimpsed during those intense Saturday mornings.
The painter’s pleasant symptom can be seen in his slight movements, in the way he rests his brush, in the way he argues with the material, in the way he anticipates the event, and if someone were lucky enough to be there to see it, as I was, they would immediately understand what it is all about: what is painstaking for some people is the opposite for him. Juan paints because “it comes to him”, and although he may not be aware of it, he moves carefully against the background of a crowd that is dazzled and confused, with the certainty of sleepwalkers.
Painting is more a matter of feeling than of feeling, and his paintings are traces of this circumstance, because they are devoted to the almost casual and accidental act of “being a painter”, so that feeling is an indispensable category when one captures an image, especially when one stubbornly tries to integrate it into the other images of the world, so that it “capriciously” manages to stand out above them all. To make others feel that we see, that it is possible to penetrate a world made invisible by words and meanings, so that it comes out as it is, so that it is brought to light once and for all.

In a world full of painters, Nordlinger paints. So this presentation is worthwhile.

Pirozzi, 2011
published on Juan Nordlinger blog, unavailable