In Venezuelan writer Julián Padrón’s vision of the work by painter and sculptor Francisco Narváez, one may discover a similarity in nativist values, which coincide with those the sculptor cultivated; in other words, those that he revisited, beyond romantic Costumbrism, to the forms and motifs that characterize the artist’s natural and social environment, above all, as he recreates the environment of his native island, Margarita. The critic captures a different way of understanding his work with great subtlety, be they pictorial (between the formal and the ideological) or sculptural (“the naïve grace”), both revelatory, in Padrón’s judgment, of a “humanist conception of new art.” It is not a coincidence that early on, the artist appears in relation to other intellectuals of the avant-garde; literary: Arturo Uslar Pietri; critical: Alfredo Boulton; or architectural: Carlos Raúl Villanueva; all those taking part in the modernist cultural nationalism, which was indebted to the formalisms of the first decade of the twentieth century.
Padrón would dedicate his second article to the artist (“Francisco Narváez”) one month after the exhibition he reviewed here, and he would revisit the artist in his Obras completas (México D.F.: Aguilar ediciones, 1957); both were reproduced in the work compiled by Roldán Esteva-Guillet, Fuentes documentales y críticas de las artes plásticas venezolanas (2001).