The Venezuelan curator María Luz Cárdenas (b. 1952) interviewed Víctor Valera (1927?2013) on the occasion of the Venezuelan sculptor’s first retrospective show at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas in 1984. Though the interview is arranged in chronological order, Cárdenas makes no attempt to talk about Valera’s current circumstances. Instead, she focuses on how his approach to art and sculpture has evolved, and takes a systematic look at his career over the course of thirty years. The interview reveals some of the difficulties Valera had to deal with in a country with virtually no sculptural tradition, where modern sculpture “begins and ends with [Francisco] Narváez,” and where he had to re-establish iron’s status as an appropriate material with which to make sculpture. Valera thus provides a retrospective look at his life’s work, which seems to lack a consistent connecting thread that links it all together. He also makes certain specific statements that were subsequently reported by other critics (such as Enrique Viloria, Galería Sin Límite, 1989; and Teresa Casique, TAC, 2003), including the fact that, in his opinion, painting, unlike sculpture, is a “trick,” a “lie” that attempts to portray three dimensions on a two-dimensional plane. Valera explains his emotional reaction to the famous debate in which Alejandro Otero and Miguel Otero Silva discussed the difference between abstraction and figuration. The record of the very frank Cárdenas-Valera interview sheds light on the artist’s thoughts about his own work and the mechanisms he used to create his sculptures. It also contributes a great deal toward a general understanding of Valera’s work by reviewing his whole career instead of just his most recent works.
For additional information, see Juan Carlos López Quintero’s essay about the series by Víctor Valera “Papeles perforados” [doc. no. 1161080].
