In this brief story published in the Caracas-based newspaper El Nacional in 1981, Venezuelan author Salvador Garmendia recounts the experience of an inhabitant of that city who manages to escape the chaos of its polluted streets with their piles of trash one busy Sunday. He heads to the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN), where he walks into the gallery housing Reticulárea, the environmental work by Gego, a Venezuelan artist of German origin. The article begins with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges about crisscrossing and forking networks of time. It then describes Reticulárea as an agreeable place to meet. The visitor’s experience is expressed in literary images that suggest a natural kingdom; the work is compared to an enveloping vegetable organism, and to an animal “that appears in order to surround us at every moment.” In the end, Garmendia calls the work “an unblemished setting without a shadow of malice,” and a light structure placed in a familiar context that invites us to take part in its play.

Salvador Garmendia (1920–2001) is one of the most eminent fiction writers (novels and short stories) from Venezuela. He was a member of avant-garde Venezuelan literary groups active in the mid-twentieth century, including Sardio and Tabla Redonda. In this article in story form, Reticulárea, a work by Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994), is discussed from the perspective of a fiction writer rather than an art critic and as such, it provides valuable testimony about the symbolic worth of the piece and Gego’s art in general. Indeed, Reticulárea is pertinent not only to criticism and theory, but is also as inspiration for other creative art forms (poetry, dance, narrative, music), and for promoting artistic collaboration. Striking in Garmendia’s text are the analogies between Gego’s Reticulárea and natural kingdoms, and the ideas of amorphous and unbridled growth. His literary images could be used to illustrate theories like the “rhizome” theory formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whom Garmendia does not mention. Indeed, art critics and scholars from other more recent fields have used the theory of those French philosophers to study Gego’s work. The quotation from Jorge Luis Borges comes from the story “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” [The Garden of Forking Paths] (1941) published in Ficciones [Fictions] (1944). This text by Salvador Garmendia (original in Spanish, English translation by Paulette Pagani in 2010) was among the documents 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, currently in the process of being published by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Fundación Gego, Caracas.