Journalist Teresa Alvarenga interviews Venezuelan painter and sculptor Omar Carreño on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. The conversation revolves around Carreño’s current artistic and academic interests. The artist reflects on the importance of viewer participation in the makeup of his work—a concern that forms the basis of his thinking on the “transformable work.” The interview attempts to shed light on the originality of Carreño’s ideas along those lines, specifically how it differs from similar ideas developed by Israeli kinetic artist Yaacov Agam during the same decade. The interview examines Carreño’s career and touches on the phases of his production, including his Expansionist phase­, his exhibitions, and the three manifestos he published. Lastly, Carreño expresses his expectations for his participatory works of art and the insurmountable technical difficulties he has faced in attempting to produce some of them.

In 1977, Venezuelan painter and sculptor Omar Carreño (b. 1927) turned fifty. This interview by journalist Teresa Alvarenga examines his career at that particular juncture. After producing transformable works in the fifties, Carreño was at the forefront of the Expansionist movement in the sixties, engaging in intensive theoretical work—illustrated by the manifestos he wrote—and exhibiting widely. In the seventies, the artist appeared to consolidate concepts formulated in the sixties, specifically in relation to transformable work, which was gaining greater acceptance from art institutions. Carreño continued to take part in exhibitions even though, as the artist himself admits in this interview, he was not able to develop new projects due to health problems. Indeed, that may well have been the reason the artist resumed more conventional forms of painting in works that he would show starting in the mid-eighties. In any case, this interview is not nostalgic in its retrospective vision of the Expansionist movement, nor does it envision it as a frustrated or truncated project. Instead, Expansionist concepts are seen as full of potential for future technologies, and therefore, are as far-reaching.

At the time of this interview, the problem of originality was still fundamental to the legitimacy of art movements. There is a discussion here of whether Omar Carreño or Yaacov Agam was the first artist to experiment with transformable work. The discussion of the novelty of concepts appears to entail a tension between the local and the foreign, between recognition of Venezuelan artists and acceptance of European tendencies—a constant concern of Latin American artists in the seventies.

Regarding the Expansionist manifesto signed by Omar Carreño and other Venezuelan artists, see “Expansionismo: Manifiesto 1” (ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1157270) and “Expansionismo: Manifiesto 2” (doc. no. 1157254). For a reflection on Omar Carreño’s visual language, see Guédez’s essay, “La construcción de lo visual en Omar Carreño” (doc. no. 1157401).