This article was published in El Universal to report the national success of the Venezuelan pioneer of modernism Mercedes Pardo, awarded with the Premio Armando Reverón. The anonymous author explains that the prize is given by the AVAP (Asociación Venezolana de Artistas Plásticos), by means of a jury composed of painters, including Mario Abreu, Antonio Alcántara, Pablo Benavides, Gabriel Bracho, and Luis Alfredo López Méndez. Pardo’s art production was taken into account due to the “moral values that characterize her as a citizen of great integrity and simplicity, as well as for her fertile trajectory of tireless creation.” The article mentions her activity as both art educator as well as an artist, thus explaining her success through exhibitions and awards. In fact, she is the recipient of six prizes, including the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas.

El Universal addresses this article to the Venezuelan abstract painter Mercedes Pardo (1921–2005), recent winner of the Premio Armando Reverón. There are a couple of factual errors in this article: Pardo’s birth year and when she was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1979, not 1978).

The annual award is named after one of the pioneers of modernist approaches in Latin America (Armando Reverón, 1889–1954) and is attributed by the AVAP (Asociación Venezolana de Artistas Plasticos) to art contributions in the fields of painting, sculpture, conceptual art, and multimedia art, and Mercedes Pardo received it in 1991 due to her contributions to modernism both at a national and international level. She earned this prize just months ahead of her best-known retrospective in Caracas, Mercedes Pardo: moradas del color, inaugurated in October 1991 at the GAN (Galeria Nacional de Arte). Quoted at the end of this article, poet Elizabeth Schön (1921–2001) was the author of one of the essays in the comprehensive exhibition catalogue, and she was later awarded the National Literary Prize in 1994. Relevance is given to Pardo’s pedagogical and artistic efforts: she had a twenty-year teaching background in different Venezuelan institutions, including Banco del Libro, Fundación Mendoza, and the ateliers of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. The richness and variety of Pardo’s work spans from her early figurative phase to a non-geometric and gestural phase, to pay a stricter attention to geometry itself. Her experimentation with different techniques and audiences was equally fertile, with small-scale collages and prints collected in albums and edited books, and that includes urban integrations, set designs, and costumes. A multiplicity as such was in fact on show in Moradas del Color. In other articles related to her achievement, Pardo shares the pride of receiving a prize judged and attributed by fellow artists of high standards.

For other articles on the Premio Armando Reverón awarded to her, see, in the ICAA Digital Archive, Ida Gramcko, “Premio Armando Reverón” (1331139); and Yasmin Monsalve, “He hecho mía la luz de esta tierra” (1331203). For more detail regarding her 1991 retrospective Moradas del Color, see Gloria Carnevali, “El Espacio en la pintura de Mercedes Pardo” (1102285); María Fernanda, “Pintura y vida” (1102253); and Elizabeth Schön, “La plenitud más plena” (1102269).