In the spring of 1944, a group of painters in Buenos Aires declared the canvas an autonomous object — not a window onto another world, but a reality in itself. Tomás Maldonado, Edgar Bayley, and Lidy Prati had arrived where European modernists had only circled: pure geometric form, entirely free from representation, demanded its own terms.
The Marco Recortado
The most radical gesture was the “cut frame” — irregular polygon canvases that abandoned the rectangle altogether. Where Mondrian accepted the frame as given, the Argentines treated it as just another geometric decision, equal to the placement of a red square or a blue bar within the composition. A hexagonal canvas was not a provocation; it was the logical end of treating the painting as object rather than illusion.
“The painting is not a representation. It is a reality.”
— Manifesto, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, 1944