The informality and disorder of the works of Otra Figuración, of which Deira was one of four artists, led Luis Felipe Noé to characterize their efforts as a “contemporary art of chaos,” and he emphasized restless movement as an aesthetic value, although it had political and social implications. Discontent with traditional artistic values and unsettled by the political instability of Argentina in the early 1960s, Otra Figuración saw chaos as fundamental to an uncertain postwar world and used gestural abstraction to articulate the flux of modern culture. Ernesto Deira expressed both chaos and movement in Tempo, which by virtue of its title underscores cadence and speed as essential to his process. Using industrial enamel, Deira created a tangle of looping gestures in red, black, yellow, and light blue against a saturated blue field. His approach seems decidedly random, spurred not by a preconceived structure but by an impulsive and seemingly disordered rhythm. These tendencies in Deira’s work were strengthened with his exposure to CoBrA artists such as Karel Appel and Asger Jorn during his 1962 Paris sojourn, which brought the artist and his colleagues into the broader scope of international informalism. The mid-1960s would be a formative period in Deira’s career and Tempo was included in his first solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Section of the OAS in 1964. Born in Buenos Aires, Ernesto Deira began his career as a lawyer at the Universidad de Buenos Aires but turned to painting in 1954. After studying with Leopoldo Torres Agüero and Leopoldo Presas, Deira began exhibiting in 1957 and held his first solo exhibition at Galería Rubbers in 1958. A subsequent exhibition at the Galerías Witcomb in 1960 showcased his expressive investigation of the figure in the spirit of Francisco Goya and ultimately led to his association with Rómulo Macció, Luis Felipe Noé, and Jorge de la Vega. With their 1961 exhibition Otra figuración at the Galería Peuser in Buenos Aires they argued for a return to the human figure as the primary subject of art in the postwar period. Deira then traveled to Paris with his colleagues in Otra figuración in 1962. In 1965 Deira won first prize at the Argentina Esso Salon of Young Artists, the same year as the final group exhibition of Otra Figuración. He followed his colleague De la Vega as a visiting professor at Cornell University in 1966, sponsored by a Fulbright Fellowship. Deira’s achievements earned him the prestigious Premio Palanza from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1967. In the late 1960s Deira’s work became increasingly conceptual with his 1966 Nueve variaciones sobre un bastidor bien tensado (MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires), first exhibited at the III Bienal Americana de Arte in Córdoba, sponsored by Industrias Kaiser Argentina. He followed with an ongoing series Pensamiento A, in which he explored the genesis and expression of thought. He returned to Paris in 1975 and remained there until his death in 1986.