This article confirms the legitimizing power that was and is conferred throughout Latin America (and especially in Venezuela) by an international acceptance of work produced by a Venezuelan artist. It is also of considerable interest in terms of understanding the artist’s intentions regarding his Cabinas de cromosaturación (Chromosaturation Booths). The first of these two points refers to the importance assigned to the fact that such works (recognized as a contribution to Western art) were produced in Caracas. This goes beyond the practical aspect and the strategic advantage that a local workshop gives the artist by being able to work in situ (and at lower cost) on the major works incorporated into architectural projects and the urban fabric that his international exposure offered him in Venezuela. The article thus reveals the “legitimacy” that Cruz-Diez’s works acquired by having been created in his own country. This therefore exemplifies how that international relevance can provide some relief from the moral anguish of feeling left out of history, forgotten and ignored by the great creative power centers on the world.
Cruz-Diez provides important answers to Tesesa Alvarenga’s questions regarding the functioning and meaning of his environmental works. He explains that the visitor is exposed to “crude” chromatic situations with no preestablished symbolic or historical cultural connotations. The works thus express the (no doubt utopian) desire to be exposed to primary, ahistorical, and to some extent acultural situations, as though it were possible to see a slice of the world for the first time, with no sort of prior cultural conditioning. He jokingly implies that this is something that should be of interest to physiologists, since it involves what are almost biological and/or physiological phenomena that have yet to be culturally codified. There is in these ideas a sort of contemporary expression of the ancient myth of paradise that Columbus thought he had found in the purity of the American landscapes and its indigenous peoples. Cruz-Diez insists that his works function by creating an elementary (and artificial) chromosaturation effect that does not exist in nature, thus seeking what he at that time described as a “deconditioning of the viewer.” As though his works managed to isolate and concentrate natural effects to the point where they disconcerted us, forcing us to see those chromatic phenomena as if for the first time.
The article reports on the artist’s new workshop, located in the Bello Monte neighborhood in Caracas, and on the Sala Cruz-Diez, which is open permanently under the direction of the sculptor Edgar Guinand.
