Breaking the frame.

In the summer of 1944, Arturo, a magazine of abstract art, came out in Buenos Aires. It was edited by the Uruguayans Carmelo Arden Quin and Rhod Rothfuss, the Argentine poet Edgar Bayley and a young man born in Košice, in today's Slovakia, who signed as Gyula Kosice.

They planned to publish it four times a year, one issue per season. It came out once. That issue also carried work by the Brazilian Murilo Mendes, the Chilean Vicente Huidobro and the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García.

The word running through it was invention. They wanted to leave realism, symbolism and primitivism behind, and make an art that copied nothing.

In that same issue, Rothfuss published «El marco: un problema de plástica actual» (The frame: a problem of today's visual art). For centuries painting had lived inside a rectangle. Rothfuss wrote that the edge got in the way of the work.

That is where the cut-out frame came from: paintings with irregular shapes, where the edge is drawn along with the painting.

In 1946, Kosice, Arden Quin and Rothfuss founded the Madí movement and presented its manifesto. Where the name comes from is still debated among those who study it.

What they did is not in doubt. They rejected the rectangular frame, painted on cut-out canvases, added parts that move and blurred the line between painting and sculpture.

In 1944 Kosice built Röyi, a wooden sculpture joined with bolts and wing nuts that could be moved. In 1946 he made Estructura lumínica Madí 6, with neon gas. He was among the first to use neon and water as the material of a work. Both pieces are now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In 1948, Kosice and Rothfuss showed their work at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris. Arden Quin moved to Paris that same year and carried Madí on from there until his death in 2010.

The group published the magazine Arte Madí Universal to exchange ideas with abstract artists in other countries. Its way of working influenced the neo-concrete movement that emerged in Brazil in the 1950s.

Today there are Madí works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Dallas has a museum devoted to the movement.