José Ignacio Herrera’s essay “Otras dimensiones del papel” is instructive. It supplements the main text for the exhibition Uno, Dos, Tres, Cuatro, organized by the curator Rina Carvajal [see “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro” in the ICAA digital archive (doc. no. 1097310)]. Like the curator, Herrera is explicit in stating his intention not to define the artists in the exhibition as members of this or that movement. However, in the process of describing and analyzing the poetics in play and the specific works, he finds them “thoughtful;” in other words, he finds the prevailing element to be “the conceptual” more so than the visual. At the time of the exhibition (1991), the three artists that are the subject of his essay—Héctor Fuenmayor (b. 1949), Antonieta Sosa (b. 1940) and Roberto Obregón (1946?2003)—were already considered representatives of conceptual art in Venezuela. What is interesting in his analysis is the comparison between some of the works on paper (or that refer to paper) and other works by the same artist shown in this exhibition or created in an earlier period. Regarding Obregón’s Libros en papel, the writer points out that they contain the same information as his work Cuatro sesenta, with one difference. In the earlier work, we can see each one of the black rubber petals of the dissection of a rose; here, in Libros, it is not so easy to see the petals due to the folded form that suggests an infinite book. Sosa’s work Conversación con baño de agua tibia, Versión II, El espejo (1980–90) was an action presented 11 years earlier; here it is rendered in a printed form, with photographs. This allows Herrera to raise subjects such as the relativity of the authorship; in Sosa’s current rendition, other human factors intervene—the photographer and the designer—which would suggest that the validity of the work rested solely on the artist’s “thinking process.”
