The stab / tango of the return was born from the collaboration in 1979 between Pat Andrea, then a young Dutch painter, and the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.
Andrea arrives in Buenos Aires on March 25, 1976, a day after the coup that began the dictatorship of General Videla. The brutality and commotion that he experienced during that time led him to perform, in Europe, a series of thirty-four drawings whose obsessive theme is the stabbing, an image also taken of that tango of the same name played by the Buenos Aires orchestras.
With the idea of ​​making a book from these illustrations, Pat Andrea contacts in Paris with Julio Cortázar, who is fascinated by the work of Andrea and decides to give him a story: The tango of the return.
The epilogue of Enrique Vila-Matas illuminates the process of creating this work with four hands, while masterfully recounts the vicissitude of the original edition; Published a day after the death of the Argentine writer in a limited circulation of four hundred copies, and later lost during sixteen years is finally rescued, almost by chance, by the gallerist Eugenia Niño in a warehouse in Miami.
The stab / The tango of the return is a work so far practically inaccessible, created by one of the most outstanding Latin American writers of the twentieth century and one of the most representative plastic artists of neo-expressionism.