In this essay, Lourdes Blanco reviews the work of the Venezuelan artist Felipe Márquez, who is also the author of fantastic tales. She says that his “literary obsessions” have inspired his paintings and contributed to his development as a visual artist. Blanco discusses the artist’s techniques and artistic languages, recalling that from 1973 to 1975 “he was producing stiff drawings” and prints that depicted imaginary cities which he then reduced down to the intimate scale of the works exhibited at Cincoincidentes (1984). She explains how his “visionary and surreal” work can be understood in terms of what we see in our surroundings and reality.  

The exhibition Cincoincidentes was presented at the Museo de Barquisimeto (estado Lara) in 1984. The journalist, critic, and curator Lourdes Blanco (b. 1941) wrote an essay for each of the five participating artists from Venezuela: Miguel von Dangel [doc. no. 1097326], Eugenio Espinoza [doc. no. 1097342], Felipe Márquez (b. 1954), Alfred Wenemoser [doc. no. 1097390], and Roberto Obregón [doc. no. 1097358]. The exhibition was organized by the designers Álvaro Sotillo and Ibrahim Nebreda. 

In this essay, Blanco includes a brief but searching review of Márquez’s work. As in the other essays she wrote for this catalogue, Blanco refrains from comparing or differentiating this artist’s work from the other participants. It should be noted that—as anyone who reads all five essays will see—both Márquez’s and von Dangel’s work tends to be more surreal, more visionary (and fantastic in the former’s case). Their work is far removed from the conceptualist works produced by the other three artists involved (Obregón, Espinoza, and Wenemoser).

Blanco begins her essay about Márquez by stating that his body of work “is as yet too brief” and his interests still “extremely scattered,” but she nonetheless speaks highly of some of its more interesting values. She glimpses in his work the tradition of the French visionaries of the nineteenth century (such as Odilon Redon) who were also “fascinated by literature.” Blanco proposes another meaning for the word “vision” that is more relevant to Márquez’s work, which she describes as “visions” that have little to do with our real view of our surroundings. In her opinion, his is more of an “inward gaze,” that is, a “mental introvision.”

As in other essays by Blanco—who has given us some of the most lucid documents about contemporary Venezuelan artists that have ever been written—she neither praises nor indulges; there is a touch of irony in her references to certain aspects of Márquez’s fantasies. Especially when she refers to the powers of divination that artists or their works might possess, whether to “serve as a visionary” who can transmit “an event that is about to happen,” or an interest in fortune telling and tarot cards that Márquez claims “to perform professionally.”