Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this essay, curator María Luz Cárdenas provides a brief chronological overview of the work of Venezuelan artist Pedro Morales, placing Morales’s production in a timeframe that spans from 1988 to the mid-nineties. During that period, the [...]

Curator María Luz Cárdenas discusses the magazine CAL, which was published from 1962 to 1967. Due to the ideology and cultural characteristics of CAL, Cárdenas considers it “the last avant-garde” effort to emerge in Venezuela. Cárdenas values [...]

María Luz Cárdenas interviews the ceramicist Seka Severin about her exhibition Seka: Forma, textura, color at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1982. Cárdenas begins the interview by asking Severin about her art training and her [...]

María Luz Cárdenas reviews Dystopia, the work by the Venezuelan artist Sammy Cucher that was shown in the Venezuelan pavilion at the XLVI Biennale di Venezia (June-October, 1995). Dystopia was jointly produced by Cucher and the North American [...]

Curator María Luz Cárdenas writes about the work of Asdrúbal Colmenárez for the Transposición [Transposition] exhibition (Caracas: MAC, 1998). The author explains the themes explored by the artist in this show, highlighting his break with the [...]

In the first part of her essay about the work of the US-born Venezuelan artist Rafael Barrios, the curator María Luz Cárdenas identifies the aesthetic and philosophical parameters that influence the artist’s creative process. These include the [...]

Critic María Luz Cárdenas explains the various categories used to classify the works produced in the seventies by the artists participating in the twenty-fifth Salón Nacional de Arte Aragua (Maracay, 2000). Her curatorial thesis for the event [...]

In this essay, María Luz Cárdenas reviews the latest work produced by Milton Becerra, the Venezuelan sculptor and artist who works with new media, focusing specifically on his installation Naturaleza y espíritu. Cárdenas compares Becerra’s work [...]

In this essay, María Luz Cárdenas discusses the career of the Venezuelan cultural affairs promoter and teacher Manuel Espinoza whom, in the former’s opinion, is an accomplished artist who is well-known in Venezuelan visual art circles, both [...]

In this text, art critic María Luz Cárdenas explains the concerns underlying the fifth Salón Pirelli, which in her view, is a concise reflection on the conflicts and dilemmas that new technological media have brought to artistic creation. Cá [...]

In this text, María Luz Cárdenas explains the curatorial vision underlying the third Salón Pirelli and she attempts to address how at that event, new forms of representing and grasping reality on the basis of visual perception [were evident]. More [...]

María Luz Cárdenas talks to the Venezuelan sculptor Víctor Valera in a three-part interview arranged in chronological order. In the “Background” section, Valera describes his early academic training in Venezuela and his art residency in Paris [...]

In this text, María Luz Cárdenas discusses Ricardo Benaim’s artistic development and the premise presented in Una visión de Gaia, a solo exhibition of his paintings and prints. Cárdenas describes Benaim’s work as an example of critical [...]

María Luz Cárdenas, the curator of the I Salón Pirelli de Jóvenes Artistas, explains why a new Salon was created for young Venezuelan artists. She identifies the Salon’s immediate history, justifies its creation, and describes the guidelines or [...]

In this text, María Luz Cárdenas explains the key to her curatorial approach and how it sheds light on the context in which the artists participating in the II Salón Pirelli de Jóvenes Artistas developed their ideas. Cárdenas provides an [...]

After an epigraph taken from Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, María Luz Cárdenas interviews Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada on the occasion of the publication of the book Variaciones sobre Reticuláreas [Variations on [...]

In the second part of her review of La Batalla de San Romano—Miguel von Dangel’s version of the Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello’s work by the same name— María Luz Cárdenas describes the different sections in von Dangel’s version. She [...]

In the first part of her review of La Batalla de San Romano—the German-born Venezuelan visual artist Miguel von Dangel’s version of Paolo Uccello’s Renaissance painting by the same name— María Luz Cárdenas analyzes similarities between the [...]

The biography by María Luz Cárdena of Catalan-born Venezuelan artist José María Cruxent contains five chapters. The first one, an introduction, provides an overview. In the second, Cárdena analyzes Cruxent’s ideas and philosophy. The following [...]

Venezuelan critic and curator María Luz Cárdenas interviews Gego on the occasion of the presentation of the book of poems Variaciones sobre reticuláreas [Variations on Reticuláreas] written by Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada; the book, [...]