Venezuelan writer and journalist Alfredo Schael interviews Omar Carreño in 1973, a year after he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas [National Prize for the Visual Arts]. The author examines the career of the Venezuelan painter and sculptor, and his development of geometric abstraction as well as his brief foray into informalism. [The author] likewise identifies the roots of his artistic language and some of the decisive events that influenced his work, such as his stay in Paris and his participation in the thirty-sixth Venice Biennale (1972). Schael also relates Carreño’s impression of arts education, in terms of scholarships [offered] and arts schools. In conclusion, the artist reflects on the autonomy of an art work, its reproducibility, and the characteristics of the relationship between art and science.

In 1972, Omar Carreño (b. 1927) received the Premio Nacional de Artes Plasticas for his second submission. At the beginning of the following year, Venezuelan writer and journalist Alfredo Schael interviewed Carreño, and also examined the most well-known works of his career. Schael highlights the merits of the Venezuelan painter and sculptor in a career (paradoxically) lacking in recognition, despite being essential to the turn that the national art scene took toward abstract trends during 1950s. The conversation discusses the influence that the Venezuelan artists based in Paris (Los Disidentes [The Dissidents] group, 1950) had on Carreno’s choice of aesthetic position. [The text] likewise underscored the role then played by the Venezuelan state in the education of young artists and the gradual improvement in the level of national participation in international arts events. The topic generates the artist’s criticism on education and the allotment of resources; which at the time placed the country’s art students at a disadvantage.

As part of his review of Carreño’s work, he describes his participation (one year before) in the thirty-sixth Venice Biennale; [his entry] was a work of light and movement that captured some of the ideals of the expansionist movement, which he had published previously in his manifestos (1967–68). Carreño also opines on the versatility of contemporary work, which is rooted in its technological components, the myth of an artwork’s autonomy, and the tension [between] originality and reproducibility.

For a reflection on the artistic language developed by Carreño, see the essay “La construcción de lo visual en Omar Carreño” [The Construction of the Visual in Omar Carreño by Víctor Guédez [in the ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1157401].