The journalist Edith Guzmán interviews Alirio Palacios about his printmaking and the exhibitions he was involved in at the time. Palacios explains that he has taken up woodcut printing again and has been experimenting with that technique, using what he learned while he was studying in Beijing, China and applying the technical knowledge and cultural insight he acquired in New York. Guzmán inquires about the importance of landscape painting and Figuration in his work, and asks him about his memories of his native land, Delta Amacuro, and the Orinoco River. Palacios talks about the projects he is working on and comments on art education in Venezuela.   

Edith Guzmán interviews the Venezuelan artist Alirio Palacios (b. 1944) and, in the resulting article, provides valuable information about several aspects of the development of his graphic work. One of the article’s most useful contributions is the detailed description Palacios gives about his woodcut work, discussing the technique, his materials, its origins, and the limited editions that determine its market value. He explains that after returning from Beijing, where he learned the technique, he had been unable to produce any woodcut prints because the necessary Chinese materials were hard to find in the West. He goes on to tell Guzmán how he found the materials in New York, three years before the interview.    

This article is important because it explains how Palacios took up woodcut printing again, thirty years after he originally studied the technique in China. Furthermore, the list of exhibitions he presented in 1993 provides a very complete view of his graphic art activity in the early 1990s, a decade whose crowning moment came in 1999 with Xilografías y concretografías. Grabados. 1994-1999, the exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas whose catalogue included the essay by Josefina Núñez “Grabar siempre para pintar siempre” (1999).   

For further information on this subject, see the article by the writer Igor Molina “Alirio Palacios: El arte de la violencia,” which describes the artist’s training in the art of printmaking in Poland and China [doc. no. 1155701];  the article by Lenelina Delgado about the crisis at the INCE (Instituto Nacional de Cooperación Educativa) de Diseño, where Palacios was a teacher, “Alirio Palacios: El estado tiene la responsabilidad del futuro del Centro de Diseño” [doc. no. 1155596]; the articles by Olga González “Mezzotintas de Alirio Palacios: El final del aprendizaje gráfico” [doc. no. 1156997], and “Regresa a su país uno de los grabadores más importantes de América Latina” [doc. no. 1155203]; the article by Julie Kruger “There’s another China” [doc. no. 1155219]; as well as the article by Yasmín Monsalve “Soy un gran aliado de mi país: Alirio Palacios expone xilografías en la Freites” [doc. no. 1155733].