A military coup coincided with his painting comeback, and in 1976 Noé migrated to Paris where he continued to experiment, both with canvas re-texturing and the drawing process.
In 1960 the artists of Otra Figuración began to live and work together in an apartment building that doubled as a studio in Carlos Pellegrini Street in Buenos Aires.
[2] The collective included Rómulo Macció, Ernesto Deira, Jorge de la Vega, Luis Felipe Noé and for a short while, Antonio Seguí who exhibited briefly with the group but is not generally considered a member of Otra Figuración since his style quickly diverged.
[2] The work embodies nine separate canvases, communicating a sense of the overwhelming anarchy and continual unrest that defines Argentina's political process.
The crowd forms one massive animal that blindly jostles and lobbies for some low level of survival, complicit in elevating the oppressors who cynically grin and bob far above them.
The iconography and structure of the painting suggest ideological incoherency and social chaos, belief systems or regimes continually supplanting one another and in flux while the citizens remain caged.
Although the work appears to contain surreal elements, it's a true, psychological and emotional expression of Argentina's then current and seemingly perpetual social and political disorder.
This assemblage consisted of several large canvases, some lying on the floor, others propped precariously against each other or along walls, some with sections popped out and up from the canvas, displayed like fragile paper dolls on a stand.
His attempt to order chaos had led to “pictures of broken vision.”[10] After this exhibition, Noé returned to Buenos Aires and stopped painting entirely for almost ten years.
The chaotic situation turned dire in 1974 when Isabel Perón took power and street fighting between right-wing death squads and guerillas surged.
[13] Stylistic hallmarks of Otra Figuración's version of Neofiguration are strong, vivid colors and spontaneous, slashing brushwork; fusion of fragmented and distorted figures with each other and animals; political content; extreme sense of kinesis and the appearance of anarchy on canvas.
Structurally, the group made use of collage, mixed media, oversized canvases, and assemblages that gave many of the works a sculptural quality.
The group's art reflects the political instability and uncertainty of life in Buenos Aires and also, in a larger sense, an awareness of the precarious situation of all human beings living in the incoherent modern world.
Informalism was the predominant movement in Argentina at the time, and Noé's influences were the painters Sarah Grilo and José Antonio Fernández-Muro.
[3] Other acknowledged Argentine influences on both Noé and his fellow-artists who later comprised Otra Figuración, were the politically oriented neo-figurist Antonio Berni and the Boa group.