In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas finds that the work of Armando Reverón is the source of a “formalist tale,” defined as a theme of “traces and shadows.” It is a theme that Pérez Oramas pursues through the entire period when modern art was prevailing in Venezuela. Reverón’s work done in the 1930s, Luz tras mi enramada, [Light Behind My Arbor] would poetically synthesize that “arbor” illuminated from behind. Over time, this would be transformed into a voluntary, rational, and schematic sign in the first works of Venezuelan abstract art; into something more systematic by the artists working in the Kinetic art movement; and finally, into a “rhizomatic” meandering cluster rendered by Gego. Thus, Pérez Oramas believes that the Kinetic artists’ plan to eschew stories of any kind through their optical dynamics (that of shadows, for example), remained just that: a plan. Works such as those of Alejandro Otero contradict this plan; to Pérez Oramas, they project plots, shadows, and traces of objects. In an openly different approach, Gego, with her “blemished objects” and her own “arbors,” is the one whowould inadvertently lay claim to the persistence of shadows. In so doing, she would overturn all the “certainties” previously established with respect to Venezuelan abstract art.

In this essay, the Venezuelan curator, critic, and poet, Luis Pérez Oramas (b. 1960) provides a novel reading of Venezuelan modern art, linked by the thread of his findings about certain formal analogies. He links the work of Reverón to abstract artists, and in turn links them to Venezuelan Kinetic art. In his analysis, the critic returns to certain ideas he has already maintained in other essays—see: “La invención de la continuidad” [The Invention of Continuity] (1997), and “Gego: Laocoonte, las redes y la indecisión de las cosas” [Gego: Laocoön, Networks, and the Indecision of Things] (2004). In those essays, he also places the work of the Venezuelan artist originally from Germany, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994), in opposition to the “promises” of Kinetic art. From this perspective, the critic incorporates what is known as “enramada reveriana” [Reverón’s arbor]—a play of webs and shadows—as an element that persists throughout modern art. It is an element that creates even more contrast between Gego’s solitary approach and that of the Kinetic artists, here represented in the figure of the Venezuelan painter, Alejandro Otero (1921–1990). The critic is a keen and profound scholar of the work of Venezuelan painter, Armando Reverón (1889–1954), of Gego, and of the models of Venezuelan geometric abstract art. As such, on numerous occasions, Pérez Oramas has transformed the traditional perspectives maintained by critics for years on these matters. In this regard, the look he takes at the work of Otero is important. In the critic’s opinion, as a master of abstract art, Otero “would recover” or pursue the legacy “of Reverón,” and this is significant to understanding why “his work contains a fascinating repertoire of contradictions.”