In Spanish, the suffix “–azo” or “–aza” has multiple meanings: it can function as an augmentative (a big dog is a perrazo), and it can convey either a derogatory or appreciative sense (the latter is frequently applied in the realm of football, where remarkable goals are golazos). It can also carry an emotional connotation, such as when describing an exceptional mother as a madraza. This suffix can sometimes indicates a forceful impact, as in almohadillazo (a strike performed with a cushion). However, in the case of dibujazo, which stems from the term dibujo (drawing), we cannot trace a genealogy that gives it a single meaning. Since the 1970s, this composite word, accompanied by its article, has come to represent a brief but influential epoch within the visual arts in Uruguay. The “El Dibujazo” Collection, housed at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), comprises 108 drawings that constitute an important portion of the artworks created by this group. The collection contains drawings primarily produced between 1965 and 1975 by more than thirty artists, with Alberto Schunk and Álvaro Armesto featuring prominently.

Although the name “El Dibujazo” is universally attributed to the critic María Luisa Torrens, who made it public for the first time in December of 1972 when describing this artistic movement in an annual review for the Uruguayan newspaper El País, 1  the term had been widely in use since 1969 in tertulias and cafés, particularly around Galería U in Montevideo. 2  Indeed, the term cannot be traced back to a single person. According to curator Manuel Neves, for artist Jorge Paéz the denomination was associated with scale, given that his drawings were mural size. 3 Conversely, Domingo Ferreira posits that the suffix shares an affinity with the Cordobazo, a workers’ insurrection that took place in Cordoba, Argentina, in May 1969. 4 Twenty years later, a similar social resistance in Caracas adopted the same suffix: Caracazo. 

When Torrens proclaimed the emergence of El Dibujazo, she refrained from assigning a specific meaning to it. In 1972, this appellation played a crucial role in promoting and spreading the work of artists associated with this movement, serving as its formal catalyst. Fifty years later, this term can instead be interpreted as a porous multiplicity. Its blurry origin is, first and foremost, collective. Whether the addition of “-azo” was meant to convey largeness, greatness, an affective overtone, metaphorical impact, political alliances or, most likely, a combination of all these aspects, the aim of my etymological meandering here is to explore El Dibujazo from a position of confluence rather than congruence.

El Dibujazo was loosely constituted by young, mostly amateur Uruguayan artists working between the late 1960s and early 70s primarily in the medium of drawing—although some integrated engraving, and, in the case of Sara Pérez, photocopies—with a strong inclination toward black-and-white representation which Celmar Poumé, Alberto Schunk, Nelson Avdalov, Jaime Pares, and others eventually subverted by integrating color. However, the variations and distinctions within El Dibujazo are wide: Néstor Canessa’s cumulative and suggestive lines, the dark hyperrealism of Jorge Satut, Eugenio Darnet’s zoomorphic monsters, the Pop art of Ruisdael Suárez, and Beatriz Battione’s laberyinthical spaces, among many others, contribute to its diverse landscape. Artist Domingo Ferreira characterized this tension between heterogeneity and commonality as a “culture of alluvium”: in other words, although there was a shared sense of direction, it encompassed a great deal of variety. 5 

The stakes against which this generation emerged were high. In a July 1972 interview, artist Jorge Satut declared, “El arte, ahora, es vivir la realidad, o nada” (Art now means either living in reality, or nothing), signaling the inseparability of life and art. 6  Amid the unsettling social and political scene that had been brewing in Uruguay since 1968, artistic production took a drastic turn toward the medium of drawing. This technique offered a more direct form of expression at a time when artists desired to capture the moment, rebel against oppression, and critique it through the use of both humor and horror. Tools like the rapido-graph, dry-pen, and other inks became instrumental in circumventing long and time-consuming processes, as their marks on the page were immediate. The adoption of these instruments, not as auxiliary but as the central means of representation, facilitated a certain departure from traditional artistic tools (easel, brushes, canvases, oils, palette, knives, etc.), bringing artists closer to more popular forms of representation. Artists associated with El Dibujazo freely borrowed from the aesthetics of comics, cartoons, advertising, and graphic design; indeed, some draftsmen concurrently worked as illustrators in newspapers and publishing houses, as exemplified by Domingo Ferreira, Fernando Álvarez Cozzi, and Carlos Pieri. The accessibility and affordability of these mediums might have also played a role in the rapid expansion of this practice among the youth, amateurs and professionals alike.

The manifestation of societal and political conditions through creative practice during this period was not confined to the visual arts. The purpose of this essay is to explore how the escalating erosion of democracy, the constraining freedom of expression, and the rising instances of violence and surveillance influenced contemporary literature at the time as well. How do the drawings produced in that period overlap with writing that emerged simultaneously? How were Uruguayan writers grappling with, rebelling against, and resisting their uncomfortable reality? Could the convergence of anxieties across lines and words provide a reading more attuned to the atmosphere from which they emerge? The desire to ask these questions comes partly from anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s notion of atmosphere. According to Stewart, “atmosphere is not an inert context but a force field in which people find themselves.” This understanding of atmosphere allows context and lived experience to coexist, to shape one another. Atmosphere has the capacity to contain multitudes, register varied levels of intensity, and blur distinctions. Therefore, approaching El Dibujazo as an atmosphere welcomes the lived experience of artists and writers as inseparable and focuses on the intensities that derived from their lived experiences across disciplinary boundaries.

Disappearance and Abyss

Disappearance is at the heart of the plot of Peri Rossi’s politically charged short story, which contains an explicit epigraph dedicated to the guerrilleros. This motif comes to the forefront when Lautaro makes a curious discovery:

"He could no longer see the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, and this really made him laugh, because the only thing he could no longer see was the trunk: the highest branches and the gray, hard, smelly leaves, he could see them well, as always: the tree only lacked the trunk and it looked funny like that, seeing a great void and above it the plume of branches and the leaves hanging down." 12 

In Battione’s artwork, two abysses interrupt the otherwise continuous ground. Voids in the floor, connected by a thin edge, create a distinction between front and back, here and there. In Schunk’s fluid scene, characterized by a yellow background and convex forms, along with the transformation of bricks into bones, hint at the possibility that this landscape that we are seeing may be sinking and disappearing, mirroring the theme in Aldama’s drawing, where the collapse of background and foreground, the merging of below and above ground, leaves the human character on her knees, with tree trunks barely discernible on the horizon. 

Certainly, El Dibujazo is more than an atmosphere. But the claim that it embodies one, characterized by certain qualities, conjures the collective spirit shared across the individual artworks. Distortion, disappearance, and surveillance are a few of the many readings one could make. No single quality is taken up by all artists, and likewise, no characteristic exists in isolation—they echo and resonate within one another. 

During a review of the exhibition El Dibujazo that took place at the Centro de Exposiciones at the Palacio Municipal in Montevideo in 1990, more than twenty years after the creation of the artworks, Gabriel Peluffo Linari observed that certain drawings lost their dramatic, charged, and promising atmosphere when viewed in a different historical and political context. 13  My decision to incorporate literature is, in some way, an attempt to immerse these depictions in the sentiments of their time, without purporting to resurrect the historical horrors that surrounded their creation.