The Galerías Pacífico Murals: 80 Years of an Endless Conversation

Above the heads of shoppers and tourists, Buenos Aires seems to slow down. The great dome of Galerías Pacífico holds a work that feels outside time: landscapes, human figures, hands and fruit painted by five masters.

The mural asks for neither silence nor an entrance fee. It hangs above the noise of everyday life, waiting to be rediscovered. Each time that happens, it demonstrates the power of art in public space: the ability to bring people together in the middle of the city's rush.

The story behind that pause in the vertigo of Microcentro has become almost legendary. In 1946, Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Juan Carlos Castagnino, Demetrio Urruchúa and Manuel Colmeiro, then established as socially engaged painters, had formed the Taller de Arte Mural. In the building originally designed as Buenos Aires' version of the Paris department store Le Bon Marché, they had to cover a 450-square-meter dome.

This was not a private wall or a room reserved for specialists. They were creating another sky in a place where crowds would pass. The result was not simply five works placed together, but a conversation among artists, with its agreements, differences and egos, aimed at taking art into the daily lives of ordinary people.

The technical challenge was severe. The artists worked from a plaster model of the dome and had to figure out how to transfer their designs onto an enormous curved surface without distortion. Castagnino described the process in a letter to his wife, Nina: “The task is extremely difficult.” He wrote that several trials were necessary, with five or six people holding the structure while another traced the design. The distortion was so great that the artists had to dismantle the structure and recalculate from the ground. The murals marked a larger second stage in Argentina's mural art, and their conversation with the public continues above the shopping center today.

“

The task is extremely difficult.