Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this interview with Paul Keeler, director of Signals gallery in London, the journalist Ratto-Ciarlo asks him about the differences he sees among European, Latin American, and North American art in the mid-1960s. Keeler says he is determined to [...]

This anonymous article provides a brief review of the exhibition schedule that the Venezuelan artist, curator, and museologist, Miguel Arroyo, who at the time was the director of the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, is organizing. The curator’ [...]

This is an anonymous review of the retrospective exhibition of Cruz-Diez’s work at the Signals gallery in London in 1965. The reviewer notes a constant quality in Venezuelan painting—“clarity, order, and a distinct gentleness&rdquo [...]

This article appeared on the Venezuelan magazine Imagen, focusing on the opening of 1x9, a silkscreen exhibition by the modernist abstract artist Mercedes Pardo, held at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. After a brief introduction with [...]

Art critic Roberto Guevara states in El Nacional that Venezuelan plastic arts are facing “one of the most difficult periods of their history.” According to him, there is, in spite of their talent, a lack of “creative determination& [...]

This text was written for the series Art of Latin America Today: Venezuela by the critic and art historian Clara Diament Sujo. The text historically summarized the development of contemporary art in Venezuela from the Pre-Columbian, colonial, and [...]

The curator María Elena Ramos provides a broad overview of Alejandro Otero’s oeuvre on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of his work. Ramos reflects on the Venezuelan painter and sculptor’s essential concerns which, in her opinion, wove [...]

Juan Calzadilla refers to the latest installment in Alejandro Otero’s Papeles coloreados series; he calls the artist’s current period his most important one since Coloritmos, and identifies an underlying synthesis of the artist’s creative [...]

Critic and philosopher J. R. Guillent Pérez reflects on the 1960s series by Alejandro Otero, Ensamblajes y encolados [Assemblages and Glued Pieces]. From his point of view, the author explains Otero’s journey through informalism, and afterward, [...]

Writer Elizabeth Schön critiques the Coloritmos series by Alejandro Otero, and speculates that the intention of the series is its potential for producing visual-chromatic emotions. In this regard, Schön examines the theme of the Coloritmos, whose [...]

The Venezuelan critic Roberto Guevara discusses Vertical vibrante—the work by the Venezuelan painter and sculptor Alejandro Otero—which he considers to be a seminal achievement in the Venezuelan visual arts. Guevara ponders the different stages [...]

Roberto Guevara writes this criticism about the series Tablones by Alejandro Otero. The writer refers to a dynamic that prevails in art: providing solutions that feature continuity along with a range of explorations. Guevara analyzes how the “ [...]

In this text, researcher Mariana Figarella reflects on the Las cafeteras series (1949) by Venezuelan painter and sculptor Alejandro Otero on exhibit at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas. On the grounds of certain characteristics of Otero’s work [...]

In this essay, Juan Calzadilla discusses Alejandro Otero’s contribution to the field of visual art instruction. Calzadilla acknowledges Otero’s leading role in the promotion of Abstract painting and sculpture, and education, by noting the support [...]

Damián Bayón reviews Alejandro Otero’s paintings and sculptures in search of what he calls their “dynamic space.” The Argentine critic and historian discusses Otero’s earliest work and the synthesis in his landscapes, then associates his [...]

The curator María Elena Ramos reflects once again on the role of “structure” in Alejandro Otero’s work on the occasion of an exhibition of works that address that theme. Ramos notes the Venezuelan painter and sculptor’s curiosity that leads [...]

“Time” and its “behavior” are the ideas used by the Venezuelan curator Ernesto Guevara as a starting point for his analysis of the artwork of Alejandro Otero (1921–1990). After focusing on this concept and its relationship to life and other [...]

In this essay, the critic Víctor Guédez reviews Alejandro Otero’s sculptural work, basing his comments on its visual, technical, and conceptual aspects. As regards the visual aspects, Guédez identifies movement, time, space, and light as Otero [...]

The Venezuelan critic Juan Carlos Palenzuela examines the career trajectory of Alejandro Otero from the perspective of the notions of “innovation” and “renewal.” [According to Palenzuela,] the lucidity that the Venezuelan artist and sculptor [...]

In her essay, “Un legado a las ideas de arte en el nuevo milenio” [A Legacy for Ideas on Art in the New Millennium], María Elena Ramos sets forth the hypothesis that the Venezuelan artists, Jesús Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero, and Gego may be [...]

The journalist Raquel Chonchol wrote under the pseudonym, “Ray Ponte,” for The Daily Journal, a Venezuelan English language newspaper. She reviewed this exhibition on the occasion of a visit by some high-profile members of The International [...]

Venezuelan artist, curator, and cultural manager Manuel Espinoza presents the exhibition La mano, la seda, el color [Hand, Silk and Color] (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of Caracas, 1978), which featured prints on silk by nine Venezuelan artists: [...]

In his prologue to the catalogue for the exhibition of work by Sigfredo Chacón held at the Centro Culural Corp Group in Caracas in 2000, curator Miguel Miguel identifies Chacón as part of a “breed” of creators born in the mid-20th century who [...]

Divided into eight chapters, this text by scholar Susana Benko is a study of contemporary Venezuelan art. The first part serves as an introduction, and consists of a brief overview of the Clara Diament Sujo collection. Afterward, she turns her focus [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas finds that the work of Armando Reverón is the source of a “formalist tale,” defined as a theme of “traces and shadows.” It is a theme that Pérez Oramas pursues through the entire period when modern [...]

The journalist Lorenzo Batallán writes about the impending opening of Signos, the exhibition of works by the painter Mercedes Pardo at the Sala Mendoza (Caracas). In his article, Batallán describes this Venezuelan artist’s experimentation with [...]

This is the Venezuelan writer Igor Molina’s article about the work of the Venezuelan artist Alirio Palacios who, at the time this article was published, was thirty years old and had already had a considerable amount of experience. Molina, however, [...]

In this interview, journalist María Cristina Sanhueza takes up the opinion of J. R. Guillent Pérez regarding the assertions of Oswaldo Vigas, which question the contribution of Los Disidentes [The Dissidents] (Paris, 1950) to Venezuelan art. After [...]

In this essay, the poet Carlos Augusto León writes at length about what is going on in the field of art criticism; he is responding to the debate sparked by an article by Alejandro Otero (“¿Dónde está Guayasamín?” 1953). León does not agree [...]

This newspaper article by Carlos Díaz Sosa is about Jesús Soto—and Alejandro Otero and Víctor Valera—at the XXXIII Biennale di Venezia (1966). It talks about his career, from his early days in Ciudad Bolívar to [...]

This newspaper article (signed with the initials L. B. S.) is a review of the founding of the TAGA (Taller de Artistas Gráficos Asociados), which is described as being an extension of the 1960s printmaking movement connected to the workshop of Luisa [...]

This article by the painter Pedro León Castro was written in response to the article by Alejandro Otero entitled “Cómo trabajamos los pintores venezolanos en París,” in which the latter mentions the negative comments about the Venezuelan [...]

In this text, Thomas Messer explains the logic behind how he selected the works for his exhibition The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Painting in the 1960s. He also considers the questions that the exhibition raises about how [...]

Adopting a different tone from the one he used in his previous article (“El regreso a lo funcional y a lo decorativo”), Miguel Otero Silva assures his readers he has nothing against new trends in art; but he objects to the assumption that [...]

In this final article in his polemic against the opinions of painter Alejandro Otero, writer Miguel Otero Silva recapitulates the arguments put forth in the other eight articles in the series Conceptos concretos… He repeats, for instance, his [...]

In 1949, the journalist José Ratto-Ciarlo outlined the exhibition of [work] by Alejandro Otero at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas. The beginning of the outline and the two first subtitles (“Comprensión de Otero” and “La parte por el todo [...]

The catalogue for the exhibition Alejandro Otero, presented at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, (which opened on January 30, 1949) contains four texts, three photographic reproductions of works and a reproduction of a photographic portrait of [...]

This essay by Héctor Mujica comments on the absence of rigorous and honest art criticism within the Venezuelan milieu. The author assumes a Marxist aesthetic as an analytical framework and applies it to the work of Alejandro Otero. In his commentary [...]

In this letter, art critic Alfredo Boulton voices some dismay to his artist friend, Alejandro Otero. After having written generalizations on traditional western art and on the irruption of the abstract art movement, the critic adds a long postscript [...]

In this letter, art critic Alfredo Boulton reveals to his friend, the artist Alejandro Otero, then in Paris, about his reservations with the new extra-pictorial [habitually not used] materials he had begun using after the Coloritmos series created by [...]

Alejandro Otero publicly expresses his disagreement with the choice for the Official Sculpture Prize, which the jury at the XVIII Salón Oficial de Arte Venezolano awarded to the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Gregorio shortly after the latter’s arrival [...]

This article by José Gómez-Sicre is on Alejandro Otero’s exhibition held at the Pan-American Union in Washington, D.C., in 1948. On that occasion, the artist showcased his well-known series Las Cafeteras at the OAS’s Salón de las Américas [...]

This text by British critic Guy Brett analyzes Latin American art movements of the fifties and sixties, specifically Kinetic art, Op art, and Concretism. Brett argues that those movements formulated a radical change on the level of theory and of [...]

In this article, the critic Roberto Guevara harshly rebuts the theses of Marta Traba, who argued in the mid-1960s that Latin American art had been “depersonalized” and contaminated by the “mimicry” of international art. Guevara, who felt the [...]

In this article Marta Traba takes the thoughts expressed by her opponents in their ongoing debate—in particular those by J. R. Guillent Pérez—and distills them down to what she considers to be the focal point of the controversy, which is her [...]

Following a trip through South America, José Luis Cuevas published this article to announce that in many countries there was no longer any interest in the “rubble” of the Mexican School of painting and its nationalist inclinations. In Venezuela [...]

This essay posits the concept of “geometría sensível” [Sensitive Geometry] as one of the unitary characteristics of contemporary Latin American art, and notes the growing interest (within the region and further afield) in [...]