In this essay on Venezuelan painter Héctor Poleo, historian and critic Francisco Da Antonio focuses on the last twenty years of the artist’s production and ventures a stylistic chronology and interpretation of his art. For instance, he argues that from 1953 to 1956, Poleo revisited the realism he had practiced in the forties, but with a more serene attitude that attested to inner balance. In Da Antonio’s opinion, Poleo’s work prior to the sixties was concerned with perspective as a two-dimensional matter instead of as a question of depth. The sixties also witnessed what Da Antonio calls the “Machine blue” in Poleo’s work—a phase when the artist made use of very personal Informalist elements. Later, starting in 1966, lyricism and poetry in his work brought it close to symbolism. Finally, in the seventies, a phase of “poetic abstraction” began.

This essay by art historian and critic Francisco Da Antonio (b. 1930) on Venezuelan painter Héctor Poleo (1918–1989) makes a major contribution to understanding the artist’s work from the late forties to the early seventies. Da Antonio’s formulations are useful in the artistic chronology of Poleo’s production and key to understanding a mature phase when the artist engaged in stylistic revision, a phase little understood by critics of the day. Da Antonio remarks on the possible tie between Poleo’s work and Informalism during a period when that style was widespread in Venezuela. This understanding of Poleo’s work undermines a discussion that failed to grasp that Poleo’s art was always bound to figuration, which meant the translation of material aspects of Informalism into his particular aesthetic. Much of Da Antonio’s writing is an attempt to understand Poleo’s production. Published in the Venezuelan press in late 1973, this was but one of the texts by Da Antonio on this period in Poleo’s production. In 1982, a number of Da Antonio’s essays were compiled in Textos sobre arte (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, del Consejo Nacional de la Cultura (CONAC), 1982), which was rereleased in 2007 by the Fundación Editorial El Perro y la Rana, a foundation tied to the Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura in Venezuela. (See “Héctor Poleo, del realismo a subreal” (ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1153915)).

For other texts on Poleo’s work, see Alberto Junyent’s reviews, “Aromas de la gracia” (ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1153851) and “Obras recientes de Héctor Poleo” (doc. no. 1153835); Juan Liscano’s article, “Pedro León Castro y Héctor Poleo” (doc. no. 850175); Simón Noriega, “Fuentes concretas del surrealismo de Poleo” (doc. no. 1153819) and “Poleo y la cultura figurativa de los años cuarenta” (doc. no. 1153776) in his book La Pintura de Héctor Poleo; Denys Chevalier’s essay, “Poleo: la opción simbolista” (doc. no. 1162167); Alfredo Boulton, “Introducción” (doc. no. 1153883) and “El tema de la figura humana en la obra de Héctor Poleo” (doc. no. 1153964); Bégica Rodriguez, “Héctor Poleo, inventor y fabulador de formas” (doc. no. 1153899), the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, Poleo desconocido (1997); Sergio Antillano’s essay, “Imagen sucesiva de Héctor Poleo” (doc. no. 1172085); and Carlos Silva’s essay, “Arte y estilo de Héctor Poleo” (doc. no. 1172190) in his book, Poleo: Categorías del espíritu.