The essay “Meyer Vaisman. La risa detrás del abanico” by Venezuelan writer Vicente Lecuna was published in the “Bajo Palabra” supplement to the Diario de Caracas on January 31, 1993. It discusses the major exhibition of work by Meyer Vaisman (b. 1960) held at the celebrated Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. In March 1993, a version of that show, but with additional works, was held at the Centro Cultural Consolidado in Caracas under the title Obra reciente.
Though its primary focus is Vaisman’s Turkey series, the article provides keys that are still useful to understanding the artist’s production. Lecuna addresses parody, irony, reflection on identity, caricature, and comics—all of which would be central to Vaisman’s later language and to work such as his essential intervened tapestries. This object-conceptual body of work with a deep critical content became one of the most original of its kind in Venezuelan and Latin America. At the time this article was written, Vaisman was little known in his country. He had spent much of his youth in New York. By 1992, he was quite well known abroad, first as a gallerist and then as a rising young artist represented, like others of his generation, by the influential Leo Castelli Gallery. The exhibition Turkey took place in 1992.