“Eugenio Espinoza II. Los gouaches,” by Lourdes Blanco (b. 1941), is a key document for those who would study the mature work of Eugenio Espinoza (b. 1950), during what was essentially his painting and drawing period. Blanco discusses how he explores his own language, which expresses itself like a “rationalized emotion exercise.” He was increasingly using richer color that “intensified” in complex ways. Blanco also discusses how he introduces the grid motif and a few other graphics.
As regards his series, Karakana was, by his own admission, an atypical project in his career. In another interview, four years after showing the gouaches and paintings in this series, in 1989, Espinoza told Ruth Auerbach in “Paramount Pictures: fragmentos de una conversación” [doc. no. 1051406]: “I had never wanted to endow the grid with the gravity of art, the gravity of ‘serious painting.’ I only started doing it in 1983 with the Karakana series.” He later tells her that he wants to move away from painting done by hand, and that “black and white and neutral” are all the colors you need, like black-&-white photography; all the information concerning the event is there. He says “Adding color makes it more pictorial and decorative.”
This essay appears in the catalogue for the exhibition Karakana (Caracas: Museo La Rinconada, 1985). It is part of a longer text, where it is preceded by an essay written by Blanco fourteen months earlier for the exhibition Cincoincidentes at the Museo de Barquisimeto (1984), titled “Eugenio Espinoza” [doc. no. 1097342]. This essay stands on its own and is, in fact, reprinted as a stand-alone essay called “Karakana. Eugenio Espinoza II. Los gouaches,” in the Catálogo/Guía de Estudio Nº 136. Exposición CCS-10. Arte venezolano actual. (Caracas: Fundación Galería de Arte Nacional, 1993).