In this newspaper article about Armando Reverón, Marcos Castillo, who is also a Venezuelan painter, begins by saying that there are fundamental differences between artists who follow contemporary trends and those who start a “school.” He goes on to describe Reverón as the creator of a “thoroughly local” form of “Venezuelan Impressionism,” despite the fact that certain traits in his work are reminiscent of the original French version of the style. Castillo analyzes the purely pictorial aspects of Reverón’s work and discusses the importance—“exaggerated” in the reviewer’s opinion—that has been attached to the exotic nature of the artist’s lifestyle in Macuto, his home on the Litoral Central, on the coast of Venezuela. According to Castillo, Reverón “possesses what every creator and founder of a school possesses: originality.”

This article by the Venezuelan painter Marcos Castillo (1897–1966)—published in 1951, the same year in which Armando Reverón had his first retrospective show—stands out from the glut of press reports about Reverón by favoring us with a contemporary painter’s shrewd observations about the paintings produced in Macuto. Though brief, the article includes some interesting comments on Reverón’s way of seeing things and his techniques. Castillo thus became one of the first—after Pascual Navarro, also a painter, whose essay “El solitario de Macuto. Más lejos que Monet, que Sisley, que Renoir” was published in 1945—to voice a critical and conceptual opinion about Reverón’s visual works of art. Castillo notes, for example, that “Reverón’s paintings are more plastic than chromatic.” He analyzes things like the light in his retina, the discoloration of his works, the presence of the canvas, the opacity or matt dryness of his paintings, and the fact that oil paint gives the artist “the willies.” This article expresses the practical, authoritative opinion of a specialist in pictorial matters, which was something unusual at that time in Venezuelan history. In fact, Castillo’s observations foreshadow the more thorough, albeit sporadic given their specialized nature, studies that would address the same issues some years later. One example is the article “El puro mirar de Reverón” by Miguel Arroyo, published in 1979, in which the author refers to Reverón’s “visual and pictorial wisdom,” and his well-known “aversion to brightness” that “makes him use tempera, especially in his impastos, and choose highly absorbent matt bases.” 

This article by Marcos Castillo was published in the book compiled by Willy Aranguren and Juan Calzadilla, Reverón. 18 Testimonios (Caracas: Lagoven, 1979