Starting in 1991, the work of painter Víctor Hugo Irazábal (b. 1945) involved aesthetic explorations of Venezuelan geography and its landscape, first the Paraguaná Peninsula and later, and more enduringly, the Amazon jungle. On a number of trips, Irazábal developed a visual language that engaged with the visuality of the jungle and the life of the people that live there. Rather than simply reproducing signs or designs, the artist was involved in a process of re-elaboration that earned a place in contemporary art for his creations, which—like the artist himself—was concerned with Latin American identity at that time.
Federica Palomero (b. 1954) makes use of ideas, such as signs and language to analyze how some of Irazábal’s highly graphic concepts operate. Palomero also bears in mind the figure of the traveling artist and the exploration routes followed by explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt—routes that trace a paradigm in a constant state of revision. In Izazábal’s work, time and the vastness of the Amazon, define a renewed experience of the perceptible, where the real only reaches us through metaphors and certain expressive resources. In closing, the text reflects on the matter of otherness—a constant concern in the nineties and one riddled with paradoxes that vary with context. If otherness is represented as a reflection of a concern with identity, there is the risk of assimilation or of reproduction.