Luis Pérez-Oramas, general curator of the 30th Bienal de São Paulo, has long history of involvement with the Sao Paulo Biennial. Oramas was among the guest curators for the 24th Biennial in 1998 curated by Paulo Herkenhoff, for one of three sections of the exhibition: Historial centre: anthropophagy and stories of cannibalism.
Reverón aged twenty. Anonymous photographer.
The “Historical centre” involved 25 curators, was located on the third floor of the pavilion and included works by Van Gogh, Hélio Oiticica, Francis Bacon, Alfredo Volpi, Tarsila do Amaral, Alberto Giacometti, and Henri Matisse, among others.
Oramas was responsible for organising the special collection that displayed the work of his fellow countryman, Venezuelan artist, Armando Reverón. Oramas has been dedicating himself to studying Reverón’s work since 1988, and has written innumerous books and curated exhibitions about the artist.
Armando Reverón was born in Caracas in 1889. An incredibly gifted painter, (he began painting around the age of seven) he enrolled in the Academia de Belas Artes in Caracas and went on to finish his studies in Europe. He lived in Madrid and Barcelona, where he had classes with Pablo Picasso’s father and spent a short period in Paris.
He returned to Venezuela for good in 1915 and five years later decided to leave the city and “take leave of the world of art”. He chose to set himself up at Praia de Macuto on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. There he lived the life of a recluse in a simple dwelling made from stone, wood and thatched straw and spent the rest of his life painting the local landscape and the muses he encountered in the region, among them native indian, Juanita, who became his wife.
Reverón with Juanita at his ranch, known as “El Castillete”.
Photo: Victoriano de los Rios, c. 1949. Col. FGAN
Reverón painting a portrait of Luisa Phelps. He held his waist tightly whilst painting, painted shirtless as he believed the colour would interfere with the work and plugged his ears to help focus his concentration. | Photo: Alfredo Boulton, 1934
The artist pictured with dolls he made to use as models for his paintings.
Photo: Victoriano de los Ríos, c. 1950. Col. FGAN
* (The photographic images above were taken from the book Reverón (1889-1954), edited by the Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia).
The bright light in the region had a direct influence on his work, as Oramas revealed in an interview for the Folha de São Paulo newspaper in 1998: “Reverón drank in the equatorial light and gave it back in the form of landscapes in an anthropophagy of light”.
Armando Reverón, Luz tras mi enramada, 1926.
“From 1920 to 1933 his painting attained an extreme form of synthesis in terms of modes of representation of light, verging on monochromatic modalities where white predominated.” (Oramas, curatorial project for the 24th Bienal).
Armando Reverón, Maja-mujer acostada, 1936.
“Between 1936 and 1939, Reverón created a series of works on a large scale in which the theme of [young] bathing “majas” forges a connexion between the structural problems of the representation of light and theatrical space he created around him: sculptural objects, cloth puppets and dolls, and dramatic architecture. At this stage his solitude and obssessivity bordered on eccentricity, yet at the same time he maintained subtle coherence with the discovery of the materiality of his work. (Oramas, curatorial project for the 24th Bienal).
The painter’s reclusiveness and eccentricity gradually gave way to schizophrenia and the artist “arrived at the end of life lost in the labyrinths of a depressive illness that often led him into psychiatric confinement” (Oramas, curatorial project for the 24th Bienal de São Paulo).
It is important to note that his legacy does not consist of hundreds of canvasses. The majority of his paintings dissolved in a mixture of Carribean light and salt dues to his use of unconventional and extremely fragile materials. Oramas commented in the O Globo newspaper in 1998: “All the paintings are done on extremely rustic fabric and some he sewed them himself in various places. He painted the canvas furiously, sometimes even tearing it. Sewing up paintings became integral to the work.
Armando Reverón, Marina, 1944.
“In these great works at the end of the 1930s, the dreamlike palette darkens […] the light, ever present, becomes reduced to a whip of lightning that streaks through the gloom of the world.” (Oramas, curatorial project for the 24th Bienal).
Reverón is considered the most important Venezuelan painter from the first half of the 20th Century, and historians consider his life’s work a seminal moment in Venezuelan modern art. The question of modernity is central to the fascination that Reverón arouses and Oramas explains this in his curatorial project for the 24th Bienal:
“Why would one think this of Reverón, who never intended this modernity, who never conceived of his work reflexively or conceptually? Perhaps for two reasons: because many of his best works reach an extreme degree of synthesis and come close to the monochromatic qualities of gesture analagous to modern painting, and because the effect of form in his work was never detached from his relationship with the nature world as it is near the equator – the qualities of atmosphere and light that existed in the place he chose to live and carry out his work. “Modernity” did not come from Reverón -nor in the majority of cases in our continent – as the result of a decision to distinguish the conceptual from the natural, the intellectual from the organic, and the spiritual from the bodily, as separate worlds. “Modernity” arose in Reverón – as it did in the majority of cases in our continent – as the often unintentional effect of an organic and corporeal proximity to the world and its contents.”
Two weeks ago, in a talk for Educativo Bienal as part of the preparations for this year’s event, Oramas reiterated his fascination for these “involuntary modernities”. In speaking of Reverón as a unintentionally modern artist, he compared him to Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosário. Neither signed up to a “manifesto” or a “modernity program”, as the majority of modern artists did. “Modernity was always an unfinished prohect, a utopia […] in Latin America it has a relationship with authoritarian political systems”. And from this comes the intention: “I have to be modern.” Oramas concludes that this is one of the challenges we face today and it emerges in the poetics of the 30th Biennial: “What are these involuntary modernities? How may one continue being modern in the documentation of modernity that occurs beyond intention?”
Armando Reverón died at the age of 65 in 1954, a year before his participation in the Sao Paulo Biennial. In the catalogue for the 3rd Bienal de São Paulo (1955) there is a posthumous hommage: “Of special interest is the life’s work of Armando Reverón who passed away recently – the most esteemed, admired and respected painter to come from Venezuela this century”.
Portrait and self-portrait of Armando Reverón in a clipping from an unidentified magazine found in the artist’s dossier
“The most palpable difference between my new master Goya and my oldest teacher, Moreno Carbonero, is that his work ends in the painting – it comes to a close exactly in the place where the frame begins. In Goya, on the other hand, something keeps fluctuating in my retina”. – Armando Reverón (c. 1949). Artist’s Dossier.