Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this essay, the critic Roberto Guevara discusses the Cuban-born Venezuelan painter Rolando Dorrego’s career and latest work. Guevara begins with a review of the art movement of the early 1970s (in which Dorrego was an active participant), which [...]

This text by Guillermo Meneses is a presentation of CAL magazine, which he founded. Published in the magazine’s first issue, Meneses’s text explains the meaning of the letters in the publication’s name: C refers to crítica (criticism), A to [...]

In this essay Oswaldo Vigas discusses his early days as a painter in Venezuela in the 1940s, recalling the first time he was awarded a prize, and the art movements that influenced his work. He also mentions his travels, studies, and companions. He [...]

Journalist Margarita D’Amico dedicates this text to a new art form: video. The author shows the versatility of this new medium as well as its ability to capture the diverse areas of human activity. The aspects she highlights include the possibility [...]

In Marta Traba’s criticism of the Venezuelan painter Oswaldo Vigas, she deems him one of the group of artists she calls “the remains” The critic uses that category to group Latin American artists who have remained faithful to their artistic [...]

Ariel Jiménez interviews the painter Patricia van Dalen, asking her about her training, her personal view of art and painting, and the various experiences that led her to develop her own particular visual art language. The Venezuelan artist talks [...]

The curator and cultural promotor Tahía Rivero launches into her essay on the work of Pedro Tagliafico with a quote from Aristotle about agora [space]. After outlining this Venezuelan mixed media painter and artist’s career and his commitment to [...]

The curator María Elena Ramos reflects once again on the role of “structure” in Alejandro Otero’s work on the occasion of an exhibition of works that address that theme. Ramos notes the Venezuelan painter and sculptor’s curiosity that leads [...]

In this essay, the critic Víctor Guédez reviews Alejandro Otero’s sculptural work, basing his comments on its visual, technical, and conceptual aspects. As regards the visual aspects, Guédez identifies movement, time, space, and light as Otero [...]

In this essay, Juan Calzadilla discusses Alejandro Otero’s contribution to the field of visual art instruction. Calzadilla acknowledges Otero’s leading role in the promotion of Abstract painting and sculpture, and education, by noting the support [...]

The curator María Elena Ramos provides a broad overview of Alejandro Otero’s oeuvre on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of his work. Ramos reflects on the Venezuelan painter and sculptor’s essential concerns which, in her opinion, wove [...]

In this text, critic Federica Palomero explores the development of Venezuelan painter Víctor Hugo Irazábal, from his formative period (the early sixties) and subsequent experimentation with various media and genres through his encounter with the [...]

Journalist Miyó Vestrini interviews Narciso Debourg for his first solo exhibition in Venezuela. The conversation covers the methods of expression used by the Venezuelan painter and sculptor (based in Paris); these include serial usage of elements, [...]

In this text, María Luz Cárdenas discusses Ricardo Benaim’s artistic development and the premise presented in Una visión de Gaia, a solo exhibition of his paintings and prints. Cárdenas describes Benaim’s work as an example of critical [...]

The artist Gabriel Morera; the writers José Balza, Jesús Enrique Guédez and Salvador Garmendia; the playwrights Román Chalbaud and Isaac Chocrón; and the graphic designer Nedo all make different statements about the relationship between the [...]

This is the script for a documentary about Jesús Rafael Soto, written by Clara Diament de Sujo—the noted essayist and gallery owner, who lived in Caracas at that time—and produced by Ángel Hurtado for National Television – Canal 5 (Venezuela [...]

The fifth issue of the magazine CAL contains an array of articles on literature, the visual arts, poetry, philosophy, photography, and criticism relevant to the Venezuelan cultural scene of the day. Outstanding in this issue are the following [...]

Curator María Luz Cárdenas discusses the magazine CAL, which was published from 1962 to 1967. Due to the ideology and cultural characteristics of CAL, Cárdenas considers it “the last avant-garde” effort to emerge in Venezuela. Cárdenas values [...]

In this text, the Venezuelan artist and critic Perán Erminy reflects on the relationships between the so-called art categories of “popular art” and “non-popular art” in contemporary art and in the framework of the exhibition Confluencias. [...]

The critic Roberto Guevara reviews the career of the Venezuelan ceramicist Noemí Márquez from a perspective that underscores her strategies in terms of the environment. Using this idea as his organizing principle, Guevara addresses each stage in [...]

The journalist Lenelina Delgado interviews the Venezuelan painter Oswaldo Vigas on the occasion of the exhibition of the latter’s tapestries at the MBA (Museo de Bellas Artes) in Caracas. During the course of the conversation, they discuss how the [...]

In this interview, Oswaldo Vigas gives his opinion about young art in Venezuela, based on his participation as a juror in the 2nd Bienal del Dibujo y del Grabado. The Venezuelan painter states that he hates the word “search” because he believes [...]

The collector Hans Neumann discusses the Informalist movement’s connection to the emotions, transcendent universes, and what he describes as a “prophetic” nature. He sees Informalism as mankind’s logical reaction to the inexplicable nature of [...]

Here, Gloria Carnevali gathers the statements made by Mateo Manaure about his series Columnas policromadas. Throughout the text, the Venezuelan painter addresses the different elements of expression on which he bases his approach: repetition of a [...]

In this essay, published in the catalogue for the first edition of the Bienal Barro de América (1992), the art critic Roberto Guevara discusses the concept of being uprooted and what that means in terms of a Venezuelan event that seeks to establish [...]

This unsigned text collects a handful of testimonies about design in Venezuela. It includes comments by the collector Hans Neumann, the graphic designer Nedo [Mion Ferrario], the writer Salvador Garmendia, the sociologist Alfredo Chacón, the visual [...]

Damián Bayón reviews Alejandro Otero’s paintings and sculptures in search of what he calls their “dynamic space.” The Argentine critic and historian discusses Otero’s earliest work and the synthesis in his landscapes, then associates his [...]

The journalist Antonio Muiño (also known as “El Diablo Cojuelo”) interviewed Omar Carreño with the aim of acquainting the [Venezuelan] public with expansionism, an ongoing aesthetic movement that he was proposing from Paris. Outlining Carreño [...]

Juan Calzadilla begins his critical essay by relating a crisis in geometric abstraction to the exploration of Informalism by Omar Carreño. Calzadilla reflects on Carreño’s embrace of the gestural and material aspects of the trend in his paintings [...]

The critic Víctor Guédez reviews the work of the Venezuelan painter, engraver, and sculptor William Stone. He structures his readings at three levels: conceptual, aesthetic, and visual. At each level, Guédez points out the distinctive feature in [...]

In his critical review, Roberto Guevara addresses the roles of “process” and experimentation in the painter Ismael Mundaray’s work. Guevara evaluates Mundaray’s expressive resources and discusses the dynamic that allows the artist’s [...]

This article includes comments by writers, poets, dramatists, and designers who were involved with CAL, the magazine published in Caracas, devoted to art criticism, art, and literature, which appeared from 1962 through 1967. These comments address [...]

Federica Palomero launches into this essay with a brief history of the MBA (Museo de Bellas Artes) in Caracas, and the steady growth of the Museum’s Collection of Latin American Art. Palomero posits that one can see the history of Latin American [...]

The writer Ivonne Rivas begins this text on the Venezuelan painter Onofre Frías with the history of the problem of the spatial element in art. This was first addressed by the Impressionists, then turned into a major issue by 20th century artists. [...]

In this interview published in a catalogue of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, the painter Oswaldo Vigas relates the development of his interest in tapestry and his beginnings in this technique starting in 1971 under the patronage of Ana Teresa [...]

Ariel Jiménez interviews the Venezuelan mixed media artist Luis Lartitegui during the course of the latter’s second one-man show. Throughout the conversation, Lartitegui discusses the inspirations for his work and emphasizes its conceptual nature [...]

This is the first expansionist manifesto signed by a group of Venezuelan artists: the painter and sculptor Omar Carreño, the painter Andrés Guzmán, the sculptor Rubén Márquez, and the painter Alirio Oramas. The text of the manifesto calls for a [...]

Only three members of the group were involved in the publication of the second expansionist manifesto: Omar Carreño and Rubén Márquez, both of whom were painters and sculptors, and the graphic designer Álvaro Sotillo. The text of the manifesto [...]

Juan Calzadilla refers to the latest installment in Alejandro Otero’s Papeles coloreados series; he calls the artist’s current period his most important one since Coloritmos, and identifies an underlying synthesis of the artist’s creative [...]

The researcher Iris Peruga reviews the works created by the Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca over the course of two decades and assembled here for this one-man show. Peruga begins by mentioning the quality of the works that allude to invisible [...]

The curator Luis Ángel Duque offers a critical review of the artistic career of Jorge Pizzani during the 1980s. The text covers a period of successive expressive transitions by Pizzani: from drawing to painting, from paper to canvas, and from color [...]

In this introductory text, critic Inocente Palacios reflects on the precedents of Venezuelan Kinetic art and the changes it proposes in the relationship between the artist and the material, on the one hand, and between the viewer and the work, on the [...]

In this essay, the critic Víctor Guédez reflects on the artistic language developed by the Venezuelan painter and sculptor Omar Carreño. The author states that an artistic career should be viewed as the result of a series of experiments, and not [...]

The critic Víctor Guédez discusses the Venezuelan painter Mateo Manaure’s career, which is characterized by radical changes in his artistic language from one phase to another. Guédez defines the process of creation as being less evolutionary [...]

With this text, Mateo Manaure announced his decision to leave the city and build a studio near his hometown of Uracoa in the state of Monagas. He says that he wants to spend more time painting and to make work with a more indigenous spirit pursuant [...]

In this article, Juan Liscano delivers a positive critique of the painter Oswaldo Vigas’ “reiteration” of subjects with Latin American and Venezuelan roots in the face of the rising importance of “technological art.” In the same vein, [...]

In this article, Venezuelan critic Víctor Guédez analyzes a series of paradoxes that are present in the work of the artist Oswaldo Vigas that fluctuate between the motivations pursued by the artist, the viewer’s reactions, its thematic meaning, [...]

In this text, artist Oswaldo Vigas defends his artistic language against dominant styles and the expectations of the art market. In his view, both commercial and uncultivated affluent sectors have contributed to the distortion of the meaning of [...]

The Venezuelan critic Roberto Guevara discusses Vertical vibrante—the work by the Venezuelan painter and sculptor Alejandro Otero—which he considers to be a seminal achievement in the Venezuelan visual arts. Guevara ponders the different stages [...]