Museo Virtual VA UK

Eugenio Espinoza

Antonio Lazo

"Adoraciones a un Dios revelado"

any Latin American artists, when pondering on their identity, doubting, have convinced themselves that our truest option of authenticity is our colonialist trauma, held by a chain of Catholic feelings. Our painting, architecture and social laws are continuously undermined by deeply-ingrained involuntary traditions that are usually not subject to close study. Nineteenth Century colonial painting has exerted significant influence in both the highest and lowest social levels as to the manner in which art is appreciated, perhaps due to an eternal need of worshipping icons. Baroque and Mannerist expressions are the dominant esthetics that characterize Latin American feeling. In art, these feelings are always represented by Christian suffering, examined from multiple perspectives. Suffering has been the central theme of Western art since the Renaissance, as well as that pertaining to loneliness, nostalgia, sadness, repression, anguish, fear, and guilt complexes. A painter such as Matisse would never have flourished in Latin America, since serenity and a celebration of life were the bases of his work. It seems as though the art generated by the colonialist culture tradition had no interest in the ideas of the developed world. B rbaro Rivas þbarbarouslyþ addressed the religious motif in his painting, involving his immediate environment and the simple life of our country towns. His works are authentic poetic songs, where loneliness and poverty are overcome by an na‹ve happiness, sprung from a unique faith. During the last few years, a contemporary artistic trend to retake Christianity has been steadily growing in Venezuela, in addition to a quest for the anthropological. I cannot tell whether these are priority changes or authentic efforts to describe our own reality.

Forms of the Religious Element

Artists such as Antonio Lazo, Ernesto Le¢n, Claudio Perna, Hern ndez DþJes£s, H‚ctor Fuenmayor, Rolando Pe¤a, Carlos Zerpa or Hern ndez Diez are all seekers of the mystery of the representation of Christ, Jos‚ Gregorio Hern ndez, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, or Sim¢n Bol¡var, another leader of our popular religious expression. Allegorically, Antonio Lazo develops all these icons. They are the central theme of his painting, which he performs þdramatizing that which is dramatic in itselfþ, using all the expressionist resources of realism. Lazo has been able to integrate multiple disciplines into his work, as well as a diversity of objects and daring constructions in two-dimentional support; perhaps, in this manner, he ensures that his representations are characterized by a greater realism. Calligraphy, the naked expression of drawing, is continuously used as a pictorial recourse. His energetic and agitated brushwork solely stops before the representation of the workþs central figure, paying unnecessary respect to the original iconography. Thus, Lazo is presented as a an enthusiast, a lover of the pictorial tradition, of history and reality. He is a painter who lives for seeking (or expressing) its strength. This search is an irrepressible action in the context of Latin American Art. It is interesting to point out that Lazoþs painting had an unfinished quality during the sixties and seventies, when he began to explore the present. It is important to note how, from a constructive viewpoint, Lazo began to grant his work during the eighties -the promiscuous decade- a special dimension based on recycling the work of a group of totally unprejudiced artists, such as F‚lix Perdomo, Ernesto Le¢n, Oscar Pellegrino, Onofre Fr¡as, and his much-admired Tapies. Such reclycling is significant, since it liberates our artist from the pressure exerted by the Venezuelan masters of the sixties. In his work, Lazo conveys his strength through the monumental and the heroic, elements which are also fundamental in the work of Anselm, Kiefer and Beuys.

Looking Towards Europe

It is not my intention to create a negative referential climate between Kiefer and Lazo; on the contrary, I am rather inclined toward a reflexive approach between these artists and us. The abyss that separates one from the other is totally cultural. Kieferþs sensitivity reminds us of the Nineteenth Century French Romantics, for his þmelancholy and delicately masochistic spiritþ. Kieferþs strife is to liberate the repressed emotions of Nazism; he revives alchemy and is diabolically interested in þevoking metaphors of mystical creativityþ. He dramatizes, as Mephistopheles, his thematic and historical material, aiming at absurdity and irony: his work is filled with þpoisonous meanings that expel toxic poetic steam.þ Kiefer moves us deeply, not only for his pictorial daring, but also for the other very special elements that are inseparable from his life and culture; among these, his relationship with life and death, desire and abandonment; his multiple historical associations, the despairing affirmation of his German identity, which entraps him in old sickly obsessions and, likewise, seals his historical oppression. He always opted for self-destruction, in the manner of Fassbinder. The history of German art has been consolidated through the works of many Kiefers, many Contemporary Art Museums and hundreds of artists that have sliced off their ears. In Venezuela, with an art history that is different, fresh, na‹ve, convulsed and still adolescent, only recently have we begun, as of Rever¢n, to build a feverish destiny at our own risk. In Lazoþs work, we find a celebration of the impetuousness that characterizes us. But the expression of our history through the arts remains a secret, aphotic and reticent expression. We must write new scripts. In our current reality, our colonialist situation does not differ much from that of the past century; it remains a trauma that cannot find the right answer.

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This article is reproduced from the "Papel Literario" of EL NACIONAL with permission of its editors

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