The critic Cipriano S. Vitureira discusses Miguel Ángel Pareja’s painting, approaching it from several different perspectives. For example, assessing the painter’s exploration of new European isms that emerged during the two World Wars, which he has “digested” and used to express his ideas on social issues. Vitureira associates Pareja with other progressive artists, and laments the fact that the Uruguayan public—especially the upper classes—cannot understand his work.  

At the time when Cipriano Santiago Vitureira (1907–77) wrote this article, Pareja was extremely familiar with the work of a great many Uruguayan and foreign artists. He had studied under the painter Manuel Rosé (1882–1961); he was a member of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Montevideo, where he studied with Guillermo Laborde (1886–1940) and took sculpture lessons from Germán Cabrera (1903–90). Pareja had been to Europe where he spent time in a number of studios, especially with Roger Bissière (1886–1964). Vitureira underscores Pareja’s courage and his constant efforts to promote new trends and movements in Uruguay (where people were resistant to innovation), steadily trying to digest contemporary visual languages and use them to express the new social awareness he saw around him. According to the critic, these elements injected excitement into his art, reflecting his focus on structural synthesis, his endless exploration of color (that emerges from within), and his expression of figures in search of simplicity. Though Pareja had analyzed Cubism, the traits that Vitureira identified tended to distance him from the cold, cerebral quality of that particular ism; the critic describes him as “a primitive,” but not naïve, because of his artistic talent for inner expression. In Vitureira’s opinion, a truly Uruguayan form of expression must include the elements that were considered progressive organisms: that is, syncretic structure, color, and expression. He deplores the local inability to understand such ideas, attributing it to the community’s static environment and a biased chauvinism that can only appreciate art based on gauchos, blacks, or the urban poor. Vitureira discerns social causes underlying these attitudes: the well-entrenched, luxurious, childish comfort of the upper classes. In contrast to that sort of complacency, the critic suggests that the artist tastes the world as “something else.” Vitureira finds similarities between Pareja and other socially conscious Uruguayan artists, such as Carlos Prevosti and Carmelo Rivello, but sees very personal, hard to define qualities in Pareja’s work.