Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Luis Pérez-Oramas wrote this curatorial text on the exhibition Usted, el espacio by the Venezuelan artist Alí González exhibiting at the Galería D’Museo (Caracas, 2001). Opting to envision the work poetically, he approaches the work of Gonzá [...]

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

By way of an open letter, Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas (b. 1960) introduces the exhibition Pinturas, work by Luis Lizardo, organized by the Centro de Arte Euroamericano (Caracas, 1996). The letter is a meditation (of a poetic nature) on the ideas and [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas analyzes the work Autocurrículum by the Venezuelan conceptual artist Claudio Perna. Pérez-Oramas defines this work from several different angles: as a physical object, as a written work and as conceptual [...]

The writer describes and analyzes the work of the Venezuelan visual artist shown in the exhibition that bears his name, Juan Iribarren (Sala Mendoza, Caracas, 1994). Based on his study of these paintings, Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas formulates what he [...]

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 the view of curator Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, Juan Araujo’s landscapes have the power to express all the significance that painting can. The works in the exhibition Holanda. Juan Araujo (Caracas: Galería D’Museo, 2002) constitute a free [...]

Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas analyzes Gego’s work in light of what he considers her contribution to the history of visual art. The critic considers [the source of] that contribution to be the different artistic milieu in which her artistic life [...]

Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas considers Gego the most important artist in Venezuelan modern art. In his opinion, her work broke through the conventional limits and was situated at the margin of the national art scene as “a work of critical importance [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas describes Gego’s body of work. The curator identifies the artist’s early work in the category of geometric abstraction; however, as she developed, she moved toward an approach that was “organic and [...]

Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas believed that as a foreigner in Venezuela, Gego gave her work the function of an “analytical process” by constructing a “neutral space” in a time saturated by Kinetic art and geometric abstraction. Her work resists [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas analyzes a fragment of modern Latin American art history, presented through the form of “penetrable” works. The critic describes the development of the form with respect to its representation as [...]

The Venezuelan curator and critic, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas, speaking from a poetic perspective, highlights the relevance of “knots” (nodes) or “knottings” as singular elements in Gego’s visual discourse. The critic sees the knottings in [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas discusses the typology of Latin American modern art that is designed “to be penetrated” by the viewer, based on an analysis of major works by three Latin American women artists: Brazilians Lygia Clark and [...]

In this essay about Cas(A)nto, the installation by Antonieta Sosa at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas describes the Venezuelan artist as the heir to the Latin American Abstract-Constructive tradition, and a member of the [...]

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 [...]

In his essay, “Reverón y el arte moderno,” Luis Pérez-Oramas suggests that Reverón found his own way to modernism in his painting as a result of the exhaustion of Figuration, independently of the most noted modern artists of the twentieth [...]

In this text, Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas analyzes the installation 2i997 produced by Magdalena Fernández for a show of the same name. The critic affirms the solidity of the approach to the work insofar as it builds on the abstract-geometric [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas studies Gego’s work, Reticulárea (1969) as Venezuela’s first real incursion into contemporary art. The critic contrasts the premises maintained by Venezuelan Syntheticism (which claims to be the last [...]

In this essay, published in the catalogue for the exhibition La invención de la continuidad (Caracas: Galería de Arte Nacional, 1997), the curator Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas discusses questions associated with the development of twentieth-century [...]

The Venezuelan critic Luis Pérez-Oramas discusses the exhibition of Latin American artists on display at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris from November 1992 until January 1993. He questions the curators’ chronological perspective of Latin [...]