The Argentinian critic Elsa Flores lived in Venezuela and worked there as a teacher in the 1970s and early 1980s. This explains why her critical reviews, many of which were published in the press, discuss Venezuelan artists’ early works and exhibitions. Later, these same artists would go on to be the greatest exponents of conceptual art in the country, working in new languages that were emerging in those days.
Héctor Fuenmayor (b. 1949) was one of them. This is a learned essay; the first and longest part discusses the ideas and theories of a number of philosophers, linguists, and specialists in communication and the visual arts, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of factual and analytical propositions; Al Richards’ distinction between artistic and scientific propositions; reflections on the specificity of the poetic (and artistic in general) discourse of Charles Morris; Luis J. Prieto’s concept of iconicity; Ferdinand de Saussure’s studies on the language/speech dichotomy; and the distinction between the three types of conceptual art produced by Simón Marchán-Fiz.
Flores charts an extremely interesting journey from the birth of conceptual art through its evolution, and includes Cubism and the collages of Picasso and Braque in its family tree. In her opinion, the Cubists replaced representation with presentation, the basically perceptive level with the overwhelmingly conceptual; and Braque’s and Picasso’s collages were the start of a (tautological) presentation of reality; it was, as she writes, “a journey that led to Duchamp’s readymade pieces.” Flores does not, however, as other critics are wont to do, limit herself to associating the earliest expression of this form of art with Malevich, Magritte or, in a radical sense, Marcel Duchamp himself.
As regards Flores’ analysis of Fuenmayor’s conceptual language, it is solidly grounded in theory. Based on the typology of conceptual art produced by Marchán-Fiz, Flores finds two registers in the Venezuelan artist’s work—one is perceptive and visual, the other is linguistic—which she associates with North American artists such as Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth.
This essay by Elsa Flores appears in Catálogo/Guía de Estudio Nº 136. Exposición # 142.CCS-10. Arte venezolano actual (Caracas: Fundación Galería de Arte Nacional, 1993), pp. 28?29.