Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Juan Calzadilla divides his critical essay on the work of Pedro Briceño into two parts. The first examines the field of Venezuelan abstract sculpture in the mid-twentieth century, including an overview of the most important characteristics of Brice [...]

In the view of critic Luis [Enrique] Pérez-Oramas, the authentic practice of painting is an exception in Venezuela today. The painting tradition has not carried on or developed beyond a certain strain of Constructivist or kinetic abstraction. [...]

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 [...]

In this essay, curator Ralf Christofori uses the notion of “non-orthogonal abstraction” to compare the work of different artists, among them Gego, a Venezuelan artist of German origin; Dutch artist Lara Schnitger; Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto; [...]

The critic Carlos Maldonado Bourgoin discusses the painter and sculptor Omar Carreño’s latest work, in which he returns to his exploration of geometrical abstraction. Maldonado Bourgoin mentions the Venezuelan artist’s passion for research, [...]

The critic Carlos Silva interviews the visual artist Omar Carreño on the occasion of his presentation of new work in Venezuela. Silva seeks to explain the inspiration and circumstances that led Carreño to produce a series of Figurative works, [...]

Journalist Mara Comerlati interviews Omar Carreño for his exhibition at the Museo Boggio in Caracas. The show brings together work from the artist’s figurative period, before his stay in Paris (at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s) [...]

Venezuelan writer and journalist Alfredo Schael interviews Omar Carreño in 1973, a year after he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas [National Prize for the Visual Arts]. The author examines the career of the Venezuelan painter and [...]

The journalist Antonio Muiño (also known as “El Diablo Cojuelo”) interviewed Omar Carreño with the aim of acquainting the [Venezuelan] public with expansionism, an ongoing aesthetic movement that he was proposing from Paris. Outlining Carreño [...]

Critic Perán Erminy reflects on Mateo Manaure’s Pinturas sobremontaje. After describing the Venezuelan painter’s body of work as “unclassifiable,” Erminy discusses Manaure’s unique vision in relation to his creative effort at the time of [...]

Journalist Teresa Alvarenga interviews painter Mateo Manaure on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. The artist recounts his life story, starting with his first job in 1941. He describes how he got involved in the world of printing and graphic art [...]

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 [...]

Drawn from the content of three chapters in Manuel Quintana Castillo’s book Cuadernos de pintura, this selection, the text “Expresionismo y abstracción” can be found in Chapter III. In it, the writer states that since the achievements of [...]

“Manuel Quintana Castillo. Visible/Legible” by Juan Carlos Palenzuela is the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for Manuel Quintana Castillo: Bañarse en el mismo río, which toured internationally. The text begins with an account of the [...]

Journalist Esteban Yepes interviews Mateo Manaure for his exhibition Mirar a América [Look to America], which signals his return to figurative [art]. The Venezuelan painter discusses the need to express himself in a new language, but clarifies that [...]

In this text, Roberto Guevara provides a brief critical overview of Venezuelan artist Mateo Manaure’s artistic development. In Manaure’s case, Guevara explains, it is difficult to apply the idea that all aspects of an artist must be taken into [...]

Eliseo Sierra analyzes the sources and characteristics of Gego’s graphic discourse (drawings, prints, watercolors, and weavings). Sierra finds that the artist’s work resists classification and is substantially different from the masterworks of [...]

The writer J. R. Guillent Pérez interviews Luis Guevara Moreno. The conversation reveals, in great detail, why the Venezuelan painter stopped working in an abstract style. Guevara Moreno states that the concerns and “anxieties of people today” [...]

In this essay on Venezuelan painter Héctor Poleo, historian and critic Francisco Da Antonio focuses on the last twenty years of the artist’s production and ventures a stylistic chronology and interpretation of his art. For instance, he argues that [...]

In his essay—published in the catalogue for the exhibition of works by the Venezuelan painter Héctor Poleo at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas—the historian and art critic Alfredo Boulton identifies three periods in the artist’s [...]

Journalist Emilio Santana reports the opinions of Oswaldo Vigas on the topics of abstraction and figuration, as well as the conflict between both trends that had been at the center of the arts scene in Venezuela. Vigas stands up for overcoming the [...]

Venezuelan critic Roberto Montero Castro here examines some of the opinions arising from the declarations made by Oswaldo Vigas. The author laments the “tono parroquial” [parochial tone] of the replies to the Venezuelan painter, because they do [...]

This article is written in the form of an interview; it consists of a series of questions that the critic Juan Calzadilla asked the Venezuelan visual artist Elsa Gramcko. The questions focus on Gramcko’s artistic development and especially on her [...]

This is the communiqué issued by the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo (IAC) [Institute of Contemporary Art] in Lima on the subject of the disagreement between the writer Juan Ríos and the art critic Juan Acha about the opinions expressed by Acha in [...]

Author Juan Ríos responds to the letter published by El Comercio wherein Juan Acha responded to the first letter Ríos had sent to protest Acha’s assessment in the prologue to the catalogue for the Exposición Homenaje for Sérvulo Gutiérrez, [...]

In this interview, Alejandro Romualdo Valle (“Xanno”) reacts to the ideological turn that the debate as to whether or not there are painters in Peru has taken. He states that the real problem facing Peruvian art “is the lack of critics.” [...]

In his response to the article published by the Agrupación Espacio, writer and critic Juan Ríos asserts that there are two positions in art today: “art for art’s sake” and socially committed art. He considers abstraction the extreme of the [...]

In response to de Szyszlo’s controversial statement “there are no painters in Peru,” sculptor Cristina Gálvez mentions four whom she considers excellent: Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru, Ricardo Grau, Sérvulo Gutiérrez, and Julia Codesido. [...]

Painter Aquiles Ralli rejects the comments made by Fernando de Szyszlo that became a national scandal: “there are no painters in Peru.” He juxtaposes the work of the “good artists,” those who diligently “work in silence and never advertise [...]

In this text, Sérvulo Gutiérrez asserts that any classification that entails “dividing art” is conventional and falls into pigeonholing. It is misguided since it implies taking “a part for the whole.” Sérvulo Gutiérrez questions whether [...]

In this critical review of the exhibition of works by Enrique Kleiser at the Galería de Lima in October 1950, Carlos Raygada praises the painter’s bold attempt to ignore his academic roots and experiment with the abstract ideas that “are in [...]

This article, which is signed with the initials “F. F.,” reviews the exhibition of work by Enrique Kleiser, the Swiss-Peruvian artist, at the Galería de Lima. This was the first time that abstract—“better said, nonfigurative painting had [...]

In this open letter from Fernando de Szyszlo to El Comercio newspaper, the artist responds to the remarks published on its pages by critic Carlos Raygada (Lima, May 29, 1951) regarding de Szyszlo’s exhibition of abstract paintings at the Asociació [...]

In this text, critic Carlos Raygada comments on the show of abstract paintings by fellow Peruvian Fernando de Szyszlo held at the Sociedad de Arquitectos del Perú in Lima in May 1951. While Raygada praises the works’ “total commitment to the [...]

In this text, critic and librettist Samuel Pérez Barreto (S. P. B.) comments on the show of abstract paintings by fellow Peruvian Fernando de Szyszlo held at the Sociedad de Arquitectos del Perú in Lima. Pérez Barreto points out the deep [...]

In this interview with Sérvulo Gutiérrez, the painter states that the European tradition is the most advanced in the world, showing his preference for both the School of Paris and Surrealism. In his opinion, the return to European models is the [...]

The writer Luis Miró Quesada Garland considers it wrong to brand any painting as either “Neo-Realist” or “Social Realist” based on a subjective interpretation of reality, with idealized figures and/or deformation as (a) technique(s). The [...]

In his comments, Sebastián Salazar Bondy praises the early accomplishments of the painter Sigfrido Laske, especially given the local milieu, “where art training is not as comprehensive as desirable.” His evidence of the artist’s talent is [...]

Emilio Goyburu opens this text by asserting that the “abstractionist prejudice” of which Abril de Vivero speaks on the pages of this same publication (Plástica) makes references to a form of snobbery inevitable in any movement that brings [...]

In this article, Francisco Abril de Vivero criticizes what he calls the “abstractionist prejudice,” claiming that conservative rejection of new tendencies is a constant throughout art history. At the same time, he acknowledges an “ [...]

In this essay, Emilio Goyburu divides Western painting into periods on the basis of its “aesthetic facet.” He defines four “ages” that he envisions as a progression. In its “primitive” age—or genesis—painting acted as a “graphic [...]

Five continents and one city: The Tercer Salón Internacional de Pintura [3rd International Painting Salon], held in Mexico City in 2000, was based on the selections made by five curators, each of whom chose three contemporary artists from their [...]

After a historical overview of sculpture from prehistory to the twentieth century, Gloria Carnevali reflects on abstract sculpture which, along with parallel advances in the areas of physics, biology, mathematics and geometry, underwent a radical [...]

The synopsis and the annotations in English are coming soon. However, our bilingual readers can click on “Español” to access this information in Spanish [...]

On November 3, 1952 Julio Alfonso Hernández, the director of El Tiempo, the Chiclayo newspaper, replies to Alejandro Lora Risco’s defense of his exhibition of non-figurative drawings. Hernández believes it is a cliché to refer to art as “the [...]

In response to Julio Alfonso Hernández’s negative comments about Alejandro Lora Risco’s exhibition of abstract drawings (published in El Tiempo, Chiclayo, Peru, October 31, 1952), the artist wrote this essay in which he discusses the link [...]

In this review the journalist Julio Alfonso Hernández discusses the painter and critic Alejandro Lora Risco’s exhibition of abstract drawings in Chiclayo, Peru. In the author’s opinion these works “defy description;” far from being merely [...]

This text lists the works of the I Salón de Arte Abstracto held in Lima, Peru in January 1958. The brief prologue states that the exhibition’s mission is to demonstrate how painting in Peru has followed the same “logical” artistic development [...]

 In this essay, Luis Lama Mansur discusses the period immediately after the military government led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75), which he calls “the hangover years.” This period saw the loosening up of exports, the creation of [...]

This essay about the Venezuelan painter and printmaker Mercedes Pardo describes the kind of aesthetic experience her work tends to produce in the viewer. According to the curator and critic Freddy Carreño, Pardo’s work transmits a “skillfully [...]