In this review published in 1995 in the “Epífitas” column of the newspaper El Universal, Venezuelan poet, critic, and professor María Antonieta Flores asserts that the exhibition organized by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber provides a fairly comprehensive vision of Gego’s creative process. Along these lines, she discusses the section of the show dedicated to the works that Gego created in conjunction with Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, specifically the books of poems Lo nunca proyectado [The Never Projected] and later, Variaciones sobre reticuláreas [Variations on Reticuláreas]. On the basis of those works, Flores affirms the deep connection between the visual arts and poetry. Regarding the symbolism of the web, she cites The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols by[Jean] Chevalier and [Alain] Gheerbrandt. She comments on some specific works in the exhibition and reproduces verses that appear in those books. In closing, she remarks on the intimate dialogue between Gego and Alfredo Silva Estrada, as well as the “poetics of infinity” found in their works.

Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994), a Venezuelan artist of German origin, died in 1994, and in November of that year the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber of Caracas held the exhibition Gego. Una mirada a su obra in her honor. That show attempted to provide a comprehensive vision of Gego’s work. In this article, however, María Antonieta Flores (born 1960) places emphasis on the joint projects of Gego and Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada (1933­–2009). This review is important as it commemorates the publication of the first edition of Variaciones sobre Reticuláreas—an extraordinary work of artistic collaboration that was widely discussed in the media in 1979 and 1980—almost twenty years after it occurred. Significantly, the 1979 edition of that book was designed by Gerd Leufert, Gego’s companion. In this review, Flores’s refers to Acercamientos [Approaches], (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992), which included the contents of Lo nunca proyectado, the first book that Gego and Silva Estrada made together, along with other poems by Silva Estrada; and the version of Variaciones sobre reticuláreas (1979) that appears in the collection of poems by Silva Estrada entitled Los quintetos del círculo [The Circle Quintets] produced by the same publishing house in 1982. Gego, Gerd Leufert, Alfredo Silva Estrada, and Silva Estrada’s wife—Venezuelan dancer Sonia Sanoja—were great friends who collaborated on major works that combined artistic languages. In 1977, two years before the publication of Variaciones sobre Reticuláreas, Sanoja did the performance Coreogegos in the context of an exhibition of Gego’s work at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of Caracas. A fragment of this review (original in Spanish, 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, currently in the process of being published by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Fundación Gego, Caracas.