In this essay about Cas(A)nto, the installation by Antonieta Sosa at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas describes the Venezuelan artist as the heir to the Latin American Abstract-Constructive tradition, and a member of the second generation of conceptual artists who, as from 1968, universalized a style in the field of regional conceptualism. Pérez-Oramas mentions the work of the group’s forerunners, such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and of the first conceptual artists. He then goes on to review Sosa’s work, which he considers to be the “purest in terms of the canon, and which makes the fewest concessions to an aesthetic of appearances within the national conceptual movement.” According to Pérez-Oramas, Sosa’s works are distinguished either by their high autobiographical and anthropometric content or by their exclusion of allegory, which does not, however, mean an exclusion of metaphor. He discusses the installation Cas(A)nto which, in his opinion, was preceded by the work Casa, in which Sosa gave the conceptual model a political spin.      

This essay by the Venezuelan curator and critic Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas (b. 1960) about Cas(A)nto, the installation by the Venezuelan artist Antonieta Sosa (b. 1940) at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, provides a lucid explanation and review of the work. It also provides important information about paradigmatic artists and documents involved in the emergence and development of international and Venezuela conceptualism. Pérez-Oramas makes a clear distinction between the first generation of conceptual artists (Marcel Broodthaers, Piero Manzoni, and Joseph Beuys) and the second—which is Antonieta Sosa’s generation—including artists from various places on the planet who “ignored the canon laid down by North American critics (…) and universalized a style, an aesthetic option that seemed, in 1968, to be completely unprecedented.”

Peréz-Oramas begins his essay by quoting and including the “very brief description” written by Douglas Huebler in 1966 which, as he states, “functions, to this day, as a conceptual manifesto.” In his review of Sosa’s work, the critic mentions the work entitled Casa—a house that she built. According to Peréz-Oramas, Casa was a post-conceptual work since it was a political variation “that articulated an idea that, from Gordon Matta-Clark to Hans Haacke, set the tone for post-conceptualism in the West until the end of the twentieth century.”