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Lot Essay
“We cannot remain indifferent to the atmosphere of insincerity that constitutes Venezuela’s cultural reality,” declared Los Disidentes, a group of expatriate artists and intellectuals formed in Paris in 1950. “We say no once and for all; to the Venezuelan consumatum est that will never be anything but a ruin.”[1] The group, which included among others the painters Mateo Manaure, Pascual Navarro, and Alejandro Otero, attacked the anachronism of the landscape painting still prevalent in Venezuela, and their work and manifesto gave rise to the dynamic, decade-long development of geometric abstraction between Caracas and Paris. A member of Los Disidentes, Carreño spent several crucial years in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s, experimenting with transformable “polípticos” and Expansionist artworks that directly interacted with their viewers. From the beginning, his work circulated in international contexts, seen in his participation in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (1952) and at the ninth CIAM Congress (1953), organized by Le Corbusier, as well as the Ciudad Universitaria in Caracas (1944-60), designed by Carlos Raúl Villanueva.
“In principle,” Carreño remarked in a “pre-manifesto” of Expansionism, “I consider the abstract experience as a vital discipline for every painter,” drawing parallels between plastic and ideological awakenings at mid-century. In his “new aesthetic conception,” removed from old techniques, forms, materials, and dialectics, the structure of non-figurative abstraction—its basis in phenomenology and the experience of seeing—set in motion “the greatest adventure ever known in the history of art.”[2] Carreño showed his early transformable works—irregular hinged planes meant to be manipulated by the viewer, variably multiplying and expanding in space—at the Galerie Arnaud in 1952. He resumed this line of work with new theoretical vigor in the late 1960s, establishing the Grupo Expansionista in Caracas with Andrés Guzmán, Rubén Márquez, and Alirio Oramas and publishing three Expansionist manifestos. “Expansionism breaks with the static, the two-dimensional and with the traditional procedure of positioning the form according to the Euclidean concept of space,” they stated. “The work must be integrated into the life of man; it should become part of his actions so that he himself might be able to direct its variants: a living work that moves, instead of something that decorates a wall or living area.”[3]
“The new Expansionist images create new relationships between the artist and the spectator,” their manifesto continued, embracing cybernetics as a means of collaboration. “Expansionism searches for a closer communication with the public so that the spectator can participate directly in the transformation of the work.”[4] In his own practice, Carreño experimented with projections of light and color, controlled and transformed by viewer-participants, as well as with a series of small cajas luminosas, inside of which appeared a moving spectacle of light and color, generated manually at first and later by an electric motor. “The internal life of the Expansionist work takes place in a space of multiple dimensions and is subject both to the artist’s structure and to the viewer’s volition,” explained the group’s second manifesto. “The global perception of the work, however, is attained above all through the element of time, not exactly as a fourth dimension, but rather with the participation of several viewers.”[5] Carreño received the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1972 and represented Venezuela that same year at the Venice Biennale, where he installed a monumental mansión-luz, the collectively immersive and architectural apotheosis of the Expansionist credo.
Around the time of his fiftieth birthday, Carreño began a series of works in which he explored the effects of acrylic paint on reflective surfaces and, at the same time, paid homage to luminaries of Venezuelan modernism and abstraction. In 1977 and 1978, he dedicated paintings to members of Los Disidentes and the Grupo Expansionista including, among others: Jacobo Borges, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Mateo Manaure, Francisco Narváez, Alejandro Otero, Alirio Rodríguez, Jesús Rafael Soto, Víctor Valera, and Oswaldo Vigas. The present work recognizes Cruz-Diez, long resident in Paris, whose iconic Physichromies have explored the sensorial experience of kinetic color since 1959. Here against a blue ground, horizontal blocks of color—blue, black, red, white, green—are bisected by a vertical band that animates the image, establishing a syncopated rhythm of cool colors and geometric forms. Carreño praised Cruz-Diez for his commitment not only to a theoretical understanding of abstraction, but to its practical implementation as well, singling out his evocation of “the color in the Caracas skies” in a work from 1967, possibly the green-and-blue Transcromía at the entrance to the Phelps Tower.[6] Homenaje a Carlos Cruz Diez may well recall the structure of those gates—two panels with horizontal strips of color and a central hinge—but beyond any such resemblance, Carreño’s painting is testament to the dynamism of color in space, an experience at the core of Cruz-Diez’s practice as well as his own.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“In principle,” Carreño remarked in a “pre-manifesto” of Expansionism, “I consider the abstract experience as a vital discipline for every painter,” drawing parallels between plastic and ideological awakenings at mid-century. In his “new aesthetic conception,” removed from old techniques, forms, materials, and dialectics, the structure of non-figurative abstraction—its basis in phenomenology and the experience of seeing—set in motion “the greatest adventure ever known in the history of art.”[2] Carreño showed his early transformable works—irregular hinged planes meant to be manipulated by the viewer, variably multiplying and expanding in space—at the Galerie Arnaud in 1952. He resumed this line of work with new theoretical vigor in the late 1960s, establishing the Grupo Expansionista in Caracas with Andrés Guzmán, Rubén Márquez, and Alirio Oramas and publishing three Expansionist manifestos. “Expansionism breaks with the static, the two-dimensional and with the traditional procedure of positioning the form according to the Euclidean concept of space,” they stated. “The work must be integrated into the life of man; it should become part of his actions so that he himself might be able to direct its variants: a living work that moves, instead of something that decorates a wall or living area.”[3]
“The new Expansionist images create new relationships between the artist and the spectator,” their manifesto continued, embracing cybernetics as a means of collaboration. “Expansionism searches for a closer communication with the public so that the spectator can participate directly in the transformation of the work.”[4] In his own practice, Carreño experimented with projections of light and color, controlled and transformed by viewer-participants, as well as with a series of small cajas luminosas, inside of which appeared a moving spectacle of light and color, generated manually at first and later by an electric motor. “The internal life of the Expansionist work takes place in a space of multiple dimensions and is subject both to the artist’s structure and to the viewer’s volition,” explained the group’s second manifesto. “The global perception of the work, however, is attained above all through the element of time, not exactly as a fourth dimension, but rather with the participation of several viewers.”[5] Carreño received the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1972 and represented Venezuela that same year at the Venice Biennale, where he installed a monumental mansión-luz, the collectively immersive and architectural apotheosis of the Expansionist credo.
Around the time of his fiftieth birthday, Carreño began a series of works in which he explored the effects of acrylic paint on reflective surfaces and, at the same time, paid homage to luminaries of Venezuelan modernism and abstraction. In 1977 and 1978, he dedicated paintings to members of Los Disidentes and the Grupo Expansionista including, among others: Jacobo Borges, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Mateo Manaure, Francisco Narváez, Alejandro Otero, Alirio Rodríguez, Jesús Rafael Soto, Víctor Valera, and Oswaldo Vigas. The present work recognizes Cruz-Diez, long resident in Paris, whose iconic Physichromies have explored the sensorial experience of kinetic color since 1959. Here against a blue ground, horizontal blocks of color—blue, black, red, white, green—are bisected by a vertical band that animates the image, establishing a syncopated rhythm of cool colors and geometric forms. Carreño praised Cruz-Diez for his commitment not only to a theoretical understanding of abstraction, but to its practical implementation as well, singling out his evocation of “the color in the Caracas skies” in a work from 1967, possibly the green-and-blue Transcromía at the entrance to the Phelps Tower.[6] Homenaje a Carlos Cruz Diez may well recall the structure of those gates—two panels with horizontal strips of color and a central hinge—but beyond any such resemblance, Carreño’s painting is testament to the dynamism of color in space, an experience at the core of Cruz-Diez’s practice as well as his own.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park