The critic Ariel Jiménez begins his essay “Tradición y ruptura” (written for the exhibition La invención de la continuidad, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, 1997) by discussing the two problems of cultural dependency and the need for legitimization, which hindered Venezuelan artists from coming to grips with their own historical evolution. Jiménez addresses the most deeply-rooted traditions in modern and contemporary Venezuelan art, such as landscape painting and the structural trend, spotlighting exceptional and important artists of the caliber of Armando Reverón and Gego. He peruses the similarities he sees between young artists and those traditions, finding them to be closer to the 1960 and 1970 generations than to the neo-Expressionists of the 1980s. He reports on the anthological works in the exhibition and discusses the poetics of the event and the works on display. Jiménez suggests that the persistence or reappearance of certain themes and strategies for handling them that he sees in the work being produced by young artists could be interpreted in terms of what Octavio Paz called “the tradition of rupture.”      

This essay by the curator and critic Ariel Jiménez (b. 1958) is a seminal text in the study of modern and contemporary Venezuelan art. In addition to being rigorously analytical, the essay is didactic in its review of the movements (and their extensions) in twentieth-century Venezuelan art as seen from the perspective of art history and the Venezuelan artist’s particular sociocultural status.   

Jiménez’s essay is especially interesting because of its views on the continuity (or rejection) of traditions, most particularly as regards painting in the 1980s. The author explains that painting in the 1980s reflected a similar “sense of being an anachronism” in terms of universal history, and simultaneously the same “desire and need to be ‘up to date’” that spurred Alejandro Otero to go to France in 1945 in search of modernity. Jiménez notes that the first proof is that younger artists were much closer to the 1960 and 1970 generations than to the following decade and its neo-Expressionists.

This is the curatorial essay par excellence in which each young artist’s work is reviewed in terms of their own particular traditional style (or the one they are resuscitating), whether landscape painting or a structural approach. One of Jiménez’s most interesting points is about the presence of “man” and, more specifically, the “body” (that was largely absent from traditional styles) in the works produced by recent generations of artists. “One of the clearest similarities between the young generations and the artists from the 1960s and 1970s,” he writes, “is in their interest in the body and its physical experiences—sex, pain—and to the individual’s social milieu.” He sees the artists’ struggle for equality and political and sexual freedom (with no militant aggression) expressed in their art, produced “by the body and with the body.” A kind of art, according to Jiménez, infused with sociological ideas. Subversive forces against “good habits,” homosexuality, and traditional images of manliness or violence against women are present in works by, for example, José Gabriel Fernández and Diana López. 

The exhibition La invención de la continuidad (Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, 1997) was jointly curated by Jiménez and the critic Luis Pérez-Oramas.