This essay by Roberto Guevara was published in the catalogue for the exhibition of works by Adrián Pujol at the Galería de Arte Nacional de Caracas in November 1995. Guevara analyzes Pujol’s work, and discusses the Majorca-born Venezuelan painter’s decision to work in a landscape style. The celebrated critic also mentions the painter’s versatility as he experiments with a variety of media that create greater complexity in his art, demonstrating how it evolves through several stages, expressing an inner reality that, bit by bit, becomes apparent. Guevara thinks that this process leads to a new, freer approach to landscape painting.  

This essay by the Venezuelan critic and curator Roberto Guevara (1932–98) mainly focuses on the role played by Adrián Pujol (b. 1948) in the Venezuelan visual arts from 1975 to the time of his Exposición Antológica twenty years later. Guevara waxes poetic as he reviews Pujol’s career, explaining that every time the latter re-thinks his work he displays his endlessly creative approach to landscape painting. Pujol goes beyond painting to use drawing, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, and installation in a quest for visual solutions to problems of time, memory and space that show how he has evolved. In Guevara’s opinion, this process stems from Pujol’s integrity as he conceptually and sensitively transforms what he sees at close range (in large-scale photorealist close-ups), thus crossing the threshold of the labyrinth and finally opening up to a freer, more emotional approach to the natural world.      

This essay is an important review of Pujol’s neo-landscape painting, which includes discussion on his painting career from 1975 to 1995. In the exhibition catalogue, the historian, curator, and critic Axel Stein offers his own view of this same artist’s work in his essay “Pujol en el paisaje venezolano” [doc. no. 1157062]. To read another critical essay written by Roberto Guevara on Pujol’s work, see “Pujol y lo cotidiano desconocido” [doc. no. 1157449].