Leonor Cecotto (died 8 May 1982, Asunción, Paraguay) was a 20th-century Latin American painter and engraver. Born in Argentina, she resided in Paraguay for the majority of her life, eventually becoming a prominent artist in the latter country. She was known for both her paintings and her xylographs.
Biography
Cecotto was born in Formosa, Argentina, in 1918,[1] 1920[2] or 1922.[3]
Her parents were Vicente González Leiva (Spanish) and Catalina Cecotto (Argentinian). Her father was a piano tuner, and she initially studied piano, and taught piano to earn money.[1]
From a young age, Leonor Cecotto resided in Paraguay.[2][4]
Cecotto was largely self-educated,[2] in part because her father forbade her to attend El Ateneo Paraguayo (the Paraguayan Athenaeum). She was taught drawing and painting privately at home, by a French artist, Francis Eugene Charles.[1][5][6]
In the 1950s she approached João Rossi, a Brazilian professor at a YMCA-hosted arts workshop. Rossi—known as a driving force for a "modernization" of the contemporary Paraguayan plastic arts—introduced Cecotto to professional art.[2]
Cecotto was also influenced by Livio Abramo, a Brazilian-born engraver who also resided in Paraguay and taught woodcut courses.[2][7]
In Paraguay, Cecotto earned several awards, most notably the First Prize for Painting in the Second Salon d'Automne and the first prize in an engraving contest organized by the Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano in 1966.[2]
Leonor Cecotto’s image is ‘naive’ in the literal sense of the term; it treats things with good faith and no reserve, directly and without malice. When it narratively represents certain aspects overlooked by our artistic tradition...it does so frankly, without irony. Leonor began developing her printwork from the beginning of the Paraguayan printing tradition, but it reaches maturity at the end of the 1960s. Leonor uses certain themes, like neighborhood scenes, that serve as stepping stones to adjust the images and develop their content. Leonor’s painting follows a similar path as her printmaking and coincides with it at certain points; her disproportionate flowers with aggressive colors.. and her final oleo paintings, which include dolls and mannequins in situations characterized by foppishness, express, in different ways, this melancholic enchantment with the obvious and the trivial that characterizes Leonor’s oeuvre[2][a]
Exhibited her work for the first time in Asunción.[12]
1953
Participated in International Exhibitions, most notably of which was the International Exhibition of Painters in Chicago (United States of America)[12]
1960
Participated in the First Latin American Competition of Xylography in Buenos Aires.[12]
La III Bienal de Arte Latinoamericano organizado por la Fábrica Coltejer de Medellín.
2009
Retrospective show, El Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano y Amigos del Arte.[1]
Notes
^Translated by Raquel Salas Rivera on 2 March 2019 at an event hosted by PMA and Wikipedia. Original quote reads; “La imagen de Leonor Cecotto es ‘ingenua’ en el sentido literal del término; se refiere a las cosas de buena fe y sin reservas, directamente y sin malicia. Cuando representa con un sentido narrativo ciertos aspectos descuidados por nuestra tradición plástica… lo hace en forma franca, desprovista de toda ironía. La obra gráfica de Leonor comienza a desarrollarse desde los inicios del grabado paraguayo pero adquiere su madurez recién desde finales de la década del 60. Leonor parte de ciertos temas, como las escenas de barrio, que no constituyen más que los pasos iniciales para ajustar sus imágenes y desarrollar sus contenido. La pintura de Leonor sigue un camino paralelo a su grabado y coincide con él en algunos puntos; sus flores desmesuradas de colores agresivos… y sus últimos óleos, que representan muñecas y manequíes en situaciones signadas por la cursilería, expresan, de diferentes maneras, ese melancólico encantamiento de lo obvio y lo trivial que caracteriza la obra de Leonor”
^ abcDixon, Annette; The Power Institute of Fine Arts; National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia (1972). The Power survey of contemporary art, 1972. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria. p. 24.
^ abRivarola, Milda; Escobar, Ticio; Chase, Beatriz; Corcuera, Ruth; Blinder, Olga (1999). "Paraguay, Republic of [República del Paraguay]". Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T065292.
^"An issue devoted to the contemporary painting in South America". The Texas Quarterly. 8 (2). University of Texas: 65, 186. 1965.
^ abPlá, Josefina; Blinder, Olga; Escobar, Ticio (1997). Arte actual en el Paraguay, 1900-1995: antecedentes y desarrollo del proceso en las artes plásticas. Paraguay: Ediciones IDAP. pp. 37–39.
