By way of an editorial, this “Statement” opens the first issue of Sardio, Revista Bimestral de Cultura (Caracas, May-June, 1958); a total of eight issues would be published by 1961.
The writers (narrators, poets, and playwrights), critics, and researchers clustered around Sardio included Salvador Garmendia, Ramón Palomares, Adriano González León, Guillermo Sucre, Gonzalo Castellanos, Luis García Morales, Elisa Lemer, Rodolfo Izaquirre, Rómulo Aranguibel, Antonio Pascuali, Héctor Malavé Mata, Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Edmundo Aray, and Caupolicán Ovalles; visual artists like Manuel Quintana Castillo, Carlos Contramaestre, Omar Carreño, and Marco Miliani also contributed to the magazine.
A number of books were published and exhibitions organized in conjunction with the magazine. Though short-lived, Sardio is an essential point of reference in the history of contemporary Venezuelan literature and the visual arts; its influence on later generations is patent. The magazine’s initial formulations provide an overview of the later manifestations of its aspirations, which were imbued with the effervescence surrounding its founding and in keeping with its historical precedents. The enthusiasm and exaltation in response to the end, in January 1958, of the dictatorship under Marcos Pérez Jiménez created an environment in Venezuela ripe for change and allowed for the emergence of a new aesthetic sensibility reinforced by new political conditions. By eschewing costumbrismo, local color, landscape painting, socialist realism, and excessive aestheticism, Sardio made way for a spirit of cultural renewal based on constant debate and questioning (largely from its own pages) of what had been the hegemonic parameters of art. El Techo de la Ballena, a group active in Caracas from 1961 to 1968, would emerge with the disbandment of Sardio; that later group’s strategies and stances were more subversive and provocative than those of its predecessor.
The “statements” published in later issues of the magazine would evidence its history and development. See “Testimonio. Las constantes de nuestra generación” (Nº 5 - 6, January-April, 1959) (ICAA digital archive doc. no. 112237); “Testimonio. El intelectual de izquierda y cierta estética revolucionaria” (Nº 7, April- May, 1960) (doc. no. 1172252); and “Testimonio sobre Cuba” (Nº 8, May- June, 1961).