It is not enough to say that Adrián Pujol is one of the best Venezuelan landscape painters. One must go a bit beyond, as some one who explores the landscape, penetrates and enjoys it, sees it from far away, closer, touches it and, on some occasions gets even to sniff some of the jungle's fragrances. Each painter has a way of seeing the landscape, it may be quite objectively, observing it as it is -mount Avila as it is- or it may be a recreation of this landscape, using it as a starting point for a transforming imaginary landscape: the elements' metamorphosis, the game of creation, with the landscape not just as a mirror of landscape. Adrián Pujol lives the landscape, he dwells with it. There are no easels for his big canvasses, there are no canvasses that big; it is not his style either. The painter lays his big canvasses on the ground and they get the ground's sand and matters. He works on an open field, under any Sun, the Sun of the island of Margarita or that of the Venezuelan Llanos. Burning suns. Seeing him may be a great show. Those having the privilege of accompanying him enjoy the magic of creation, but also Pujols uncommon, most personal working style.

He is not a single landscape painter, as it is the case of Cabré with mount Avila, or of Reverón of the sea. Pujol is versatile and his work is being permanently enriched under the most unforeseen geography. The most recent series of his painting show his vision of the island of Margarita, the ghost-like "tepuy" mountains of Guayana, the wide openness of the western Llanos, the ground dying for water and, beyond Venezuela, the New York Central Park's series with the veiled autumn light. Among Pujol's most admirable works one may mention two that he dedicates to his favorite painters: the Venezuelan Armando Reverón and the German Ferdinand Bellermann. He does love these painters and their works and recreated them in two of his canvasses.

At the origin of landscape painting in Venezuela there is, precisely, Bellermann, who came to this country in 1842. He visited many places, mostly the central regions and also the lands of Sucre and Guayana. Bellermann left a magnificent collection from his travel through Venezuelan landscape. Pujol follows Bellermann's footsteps when he goes from one place to another and leaves his testimonial of a transformed landscape. There are other famous names in the history of Venezuela's landscape painting: in 1862 we saw the arrival of the Dane Fritz Georg Melbye and the French Camille Pissarro. Both painted extensively and left most rich collections of drawings and paintings. Notwithstanding these visitors' significance, and the probable influence they may have had, the most notable nineteenth century painting, that of Martín Tovar y Tovar, Arturo Michelena and Cristóbal Rojas, tend more towards the human figure and the heroic scene, than towards landscape.

In 1912, a group of dissidents founded the "Círculo de Bellas Artes" [The Arts' Circle], and, among them we find Manuel Cabré, the most connoted landscape painters of mount Avila and Caracas, Rafael Monasterios -also a landscape painter- an Armando Reverón, the most singular of all. Two names enrich this moment of Venezuelan art: the Romanian Samys Mützner and the Russian Nicolas Ferdinandov, who bring to Venezuelans different ways of seeing landscape and light. Reverón singled out essentially for his treatment of light. Adrián Pujol is inscribed within these precedents. One sometimes has the idea that landscape painting is one of the predominant trends of Venezuelan painting of the last twenty to thirty years; perhaps its is nothing else but that, a not well founded perception. Abstract and expressionist painting and the sixties' kinetic painting also, seem to have predominated. Among those who followed landscape painting and gave it new dimensions, new ways of seeing and treating it -undoubtedly enriched by the other trends and styles- we have Adrián Pujol.