In this article the Catalonian visual artist and journalist, Alberto Junyent, reviews the fourth international exhibition of La Nouvelle Tendance, an event that included the works of Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez. These two Venezuelan artists were enjoying an extraordinary degree of exposure in their native country at that time; their fame brought them countless opportunities to work in urban environments from the 1970s to the 1990s. A conventional rather than academic painter, Junyent relies on an incorrect interpretation of something that Camille Pissarro said to claim that art in the twentieth century had been dominated by “destructive ambitions” that held back the constructive drive behind movements such as Expressionism, Fauvism, and especially Cubism. He argues that the great classical masters’ art was always based on a strong geometric foundation that Impressionism diluted with the immediacy of its compositions and its atmospheric aesthetic; this was the same argument that was frequently used in England against Turner and many of the Impressionists who privileged chromatic “theatricality” over the “truth” of form and drawing. Fortunately, in the reviewer’s opinion, young artists such as Soto and Cruz-Diez were reinstating that classic tradition by building their works on a solid geometric framework.
According to Junyent’s reading, Cruz-Diez’s Fisicromías rely on a geometric background against which he presents his “exquisite” arrangements with a rich chromatic palette inherited from traditional painting. He uses the same criteria to judge Soto’s work, in which color always plays a secondary role, thus emphasizing “limpid guidelines of an essentially classicistic quality.” Junyent assigns drawing and composition a substantial worldly truth (which, for both artists, is of an entirely material nature) while relegating color to the universe of Aristotelian “accidents of being.” Junyent’s focus on “chromatic harmony” and “formal composition” must have infuriated Cruz-Diez, who constructed his Fisicromías by eschewing those very academic ideas and instead concentrating on serial, repetitive structures. He applies the “accidental” spell of color to his work’s substantial geometric framework, where it functions as a rainbow that grounds it.