Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Nedo Mion Ferrario (1926–2001) was a graphic designer; he was born in Italy and came to Caracas as a young man. Along with Gerd Leufert and Larry June, he is considered a pioneer in the field of graphic design in Venezuela. A visual artist, he produced a number of works based on the optical effect created by the systematic repetition of geometric forms, which generates an ambiguous spatiality by disrupting the clear perception of the figure-background relationship that underpins traditional Western art’s representational system. He trained at the prestigious Accademia di Brera (Milano), which was run by his father, an engraver, and from 1936 to 1940 he attended the Academia de Bellas Artes and the Instituto Comercial y Técnico, both in Milan, where he was born. He headed the Design department at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, and was the art director for the Creole Petroleum Company’s magazine El Farol.
The text that appears in this newsletter is part of “Nedo, relieves en el espacio” [“Nedo, Reliefs in Space”], the article published by the prolific Venezuelan critic and curator Roberto Guevara (1932–1998) in the catalogue for the homonymous exhibition. [See the ICAA Digital Archive, doc. no. 1153980]. The exhibition took place in 1970 at the Galería Estudio Actual, the establishment directed by Clara Diament de Sujo, an Argentinean gallerist who lived in Caracas and, eventually, in New York. In his article, Guevara reviews two decades of Nedo’s graphic production with a focus on his explorations. Guevara bases his remarks on the artist’s visual discourse, which draws on metaphorical resources to reflect on perceptions of light and space.
Nedo’s solo exhibition, which took place at the CAYC premises in 1971, was his first as a non-Venezuelan artist. A year later it was presented at the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Rosa Galisteo de Rodríguez (Santa Fe, Argentina). The catalogue includes this text as well as a very brief one that was most likely written by Nedo, in which he provides and explanation for the title of this series: “REVERSIÓN is the name I have given my drawings.”
