The works exhibited at Les animaux—the one-man show by the Venezuelan painter, printmaker, and mixed-media artist Ismael Mundaray (b. 1952) at the Galería Mayz Lyon (Caracas) in 1988—express the artist’s continuing interest in the dream world of African culture, in this case focusing on the animals involved in the practice of santería. Mundaray’s paintings capture a sense of the ritual through a blaze of colors and expressionist sketches.
This review by the critic Roberto Guevara (1932–98) sheds light on Mundaray’s work and provides information on the latter’s interest in ancient cultures and the communicative power of images. Guevara mentions Mundaray’s ability to associate people with their environment. The review’s major contribution, however, is its focus on the idea of “process” throughout Mundaray’s body of work. This idea refers to the artist’s penchant for working in a variety of genres, and to his educational efforts that rate workshop activities as being just as important as the finished work itself. Guevara thus takes an axiological approach to research and to the concept of process, both of which, in his opinion, are valid concepts in terms of a particular and/or finished work of art. He also comments on the question of an artist’s involvement in the contemporary art scene, while underscoring the total individuality of Mundaray’s work and its autonomy from the rest of the art being produced in Venezuela. Mundaray stopped using color in the early 1990s, but continued to explore the pictographic universe of Venezuela’s indigenous cultures.
