This interview conducted by Irma Valero begins by highlighting aspects of the work of Venezuelan artist César Rengifo. In referring to his Amalivaca mural, the work entitled Nacimiento de América located in the Diego Ibarra Plaza in the Caracas neighborhood of El Silencio, Valero alludes to Rengifo’s ethical-aesthetic values. Rengifo clarifies his intention to not differentiate between his work as a playwright, writer, and artist, instead emphasizing the mutual inspiration and the complementary nature of each of these activities to his aesthetic ideals: commitment to Venezuela, to social justice, and the dignity of the people. Rengifo explains his conviction that art does not exist without ideology, nor is there any human activity that is unconnected to politics, and even less, to human events. Nevertheless, he affirms that aesthetics are fundamental to art; in his judgment, it is through aesthetics that one’s values are expressed.

Aesthetic, political, and ideological commitment marked the life and work of Venezuelan artist Cesar Rengifo (1915–80). This was enough to send him to prison on different occasions, as well as for him to be exiled; the life and work of the artist were conceived as a pedagogical-doctrinarian-aesthetic program within which ideology plays the principal role. In this sense, one may perceive his indomitable anti-imperialistic spirit, his condemnation of Venezuela’s economic, social, political, and psychological dependence, a kind of nationalism with roots in the recuperation of the ancestral beliefs of American man, the exaltation of the Latin American sentiment for liberation, faith in art and culture as a transformational tool for the social consciousness of the people, as well as the rigid courage of his convictions that marked his final days. These were the components of the pedagogical-doctrinarian-aesthetic program that was built on his ideology.

For additional information on Rengifo, see in the ICAA digital archive the interview with the artist conducted by the Venezuelan journalist Silvia Coronil, “El arte y la política vistos por César Rengifo. En entrevista exclusiva con ‘Tribuna Popular’” (doc. no. 1172426), wherein Rengifo talks about his winning the CONAC prize; as well as the one by writer Jorge Nunes, “César Rengifo: El retorno a las raices” (doc. no. 1101822), wherein he speaks about his return from Mexico.