This review, dated March 29, 1981, is based on a visit made by some journalists from the “Caracas a Diario” supplement to the newspaper Diario de Caracas to Gego, and to view her work in gallery four of the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN) in Caracas, on the occasion of the “final and definitive” installation of Reticulárea, made in collaboration with architect Dix Branch. The article places emphasis on the perfect whiteness of the gallery and the semidomes in the corners, which produce a complete loss of the sense of distance from the roof and walls, as does the use of wires of different thickness. The work is compared to an intricate jungle of spider webs. The article clarifies that the work is not new; it was created twelve years ago, and has been installed six different times since then, which is why some of its pieces are damaged. In closing, the article comments that Gego is currently working on “drawings in metal” (drawings without paper), and that she finds it very gratifying when someone appreciates her Reticulárea in silence.

Signed by C.C. (Diario de Caracas, March 29, 1981), this is one of several reviews published when the environmental work Reticulárea by Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994), a Venezuelan artist of German origin, was installed for the first time in 1981. The work had initially been presented to the public at the Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas in 1969, and it was now installed in gallery four of the museum, which houses the permanent collection. This article discusses a key moment in the history of the various installations of the “highly voluminous” Reticulárea which, it states, has “journeyed” for a period of twelve years during which time it had been exhibited six times. Though the article reports that the problems related to the conservation, installation, and display of this major work of Venezuelan art had been solved, that did not prove to be the case. Due to leaks in the gallery, the work had to be taken down and stored in boxes in the warehouses of the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN) in 1994. Three years later, in 1997, it was reinstalled in the same gallery by a team of specialists working at GAN put together specifically for that purpose. The gallery is currently closed as the work requires restoration before being reinstalled. A fragment of this review (original in Spanish, English translation by Paulette Pagani in 2010) was selected for publication in the bilingual book Desenredando la red. La Reticulárea de Gego. Una antología de respuestas críticas / Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea, An Anthology of Critical Response, organized by María Elena Huizi and Ester Crespin, and published by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Fundación Gego, Caracas.