Mucha Luz: A tale of Painters and Spaces in the Tropics
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Transcript of Mucha Luz: A tale of Painters and Spaces in the Tropics
Mucha Luz A tale of painters and spaces in the tropics
Jaime Gili
Armando Reverón “El Árbol” (The Tree), 1937
I want to introduce you to a small part of art history which occurred on the Venezuelan
coast. Armando Reverón is for many the first modern Venezuelan painter, modern in an
unusually isolated way, crucially one who went to Spain ‐ and not to Paris as it was
customary then, to develop his skills and thus had an unusual academic background. In
1911, at 22, he studied in Barcelona; he then went to Madrid. In 1915 he returned to
Venezuela and a few years later, when he was about 30 years old, settled into a self‐built
shack in Macuto, a small seaside town near the main port of La Guaira. Macuto is not far
from Caracas either, but in those days it was just far enough to make it a whole day out for
people in the city to go to see him. He would live there, rather isolated with Juanita, a local
woman who cared and modelled for him, together with a small monkey, and a Parrot.
1. Reverón with Juanita at “El Castillete”. Photo: Victoriano de los Ríos, c.1949
With the country living under one of its many dictatorships, and probably influenced also by
Russian artist friend Nicolas Fernandinov, he moved to this rural part of the coast in the
belief that artists should live in the same way as they created. His life became simple and
self‐sufficient in the Macuto house, called El Castillete, and so did his painting. He reduced
his tools to the minimum and colour became almost an accessory. The surface, because of
the resulting roughness, became of extreme importance. His so called white period (1925‐
1933) for example, mostly uses found jute from carrying sacks from the port as surface, and
has only accents of tones other than white: charcoal, dirt, and the raw colour of jute are the
main players, and yet it is light that comes across in those paintings.
2. Armando Reverón. Playa de Macuto 1940
He is perhaps the first artist to paint the coastal light from the tropics as a blinding excess.
That is the most remarkable feature of his painting as presented in his MoMA show in 2007.
This is the line he will carry through history, but the origins of his interest in the local
phenomena of light may not have happened due to the influence of the French
impressionists, but rather following more intuitive paths. As art historian and curator Luis
Pérez Oramas explains, Reverón´s time in Barcelona coincides with the “Modernista” peak.
Gaudí, who was active then, believed that light in the Mediterranean was the “good one”:
“on its shores (…) medium light at 45 degrees (…) the light that best defines solids and
reveals their form(…) Neither excessive nor insufficient, as both these extremes are blinding
and the blind do not see”1. He may have said this, thinking more as an architect than as a
painter, but the conclusion is the same: get more or less light than that, more or less angle,
and you would be moving away from the ideal, towards views that had less clarity. The
French impressionists explored a different kind of brightness, one that comes from the dark
somehow, whereas the Venezuelan Caribbean coast, seen from this quote, would be an
example of a place with far too much light. Reverón, who before moving back did some
beautiful night paintings as well, would be an example of an artist who was more interested
in the extremes, where vision becomes more difficult, than in well‐defined edges.
1 Pérez‐Oramas, Luis. “Armando Reverón and Modern Art in Latin America” in Elderfield, John Reverón. MoMA Catalogue, 2007. p.90
3. Armando Reverón. Marina, 1927
With a first mental crisis entering his forties, he started creating dolls which he used as
models. They had names and separate personalities. He also made objects to accompany
them: a cardboard piano, music scripts, masks, bird cages... Because he was only using the
materials available, these objects together became an amazing scenography for the
spectacle he offered to the visitors he received more and more often as his fame grew. The
“Madman of Macuto” –as he was known‐ was becoming famous in art circles towards the
1930’s, and collectors from Caracas went to see this contemporary Robinson Crusoe who
would often set up theatrical acts for them, giving flamboyant presentations that fitted their
idea of an ‘eccentric artist’. He wouldn’t mind painting voluptuously in front of the cameras,
as the three documentaries that were filmed about him reveal.2 But in truth, even if some
people left the place with paintings, only very few of them truly appreciated what they were
taking beyond the value of a souvenir.
2 Films about Reverón during his lifetime were made in 1951 by Margot Benacerraf; in 1945 by Roberto Lucca and in 1929 by Edgar Anzola
4. Reverón with Dolls. Photo: Victoriano de Los Ríos c.1949‐50
Amongst them, only a few recurrent visitors were crucial in Reverón´s inclusion in art
history. Photographer and historian Alfredo Boulton was his artistic godfather, sometimes
deciding even who should be able to buy what, and naming and valuating his series and
paintings. Artist Alejandro Otero, a frequent visitor, spoke from painter to painter and
showed great respect and some influence. Finally Armando Planchart, who would take care
of his health, and would drive him to the mental asylum whenever it became necessary.
Reverón suffered a late form of schizophrenia, probably related to a thyphoid fever he had
as a child, and spent the last few years of his life in an asylum in the centre of Caracas. He
died there in 1954, whilst a major, first museum retrospective exhibition was being
organised for him.3
3 Architect Federico Vegas in his novel Los Incurables (Editorial Alfa, Caracas, 2011) creates a story full of real anecdotes around
the painter and some of his doctors. A chapter of the book is at: http://prodavinci.com/2013/02/04/artes/sobre‐la‐villa‐
reveron‐por‐federico‐vegas/
5. Reverón painting a portrait of Luisa Phelps. Photo: Alfredo Boulton, 1934
The meeting of the two Armandos is crucial here. Armando Planchart and his wife Anala
were a well‐connected couple that made a fortune selling American cars in this new, oil‐rich
nation. As art‐conscious and design‐aware people, they were early readers of Domus
Magazine, whose Editor was the Architect and Designer Gio Ponti. With apparently
unlimited means, in 1950 they decided to contact Ponti himself to design their new house.
Easily overcoming the initial doubts, due to the straightforwardness of this confident couple,
Ponti received them and they bonded perfectly. Villa Planchart would some years later
become a milestone in mid‐modernist house design. Given the recent downfall of the
country, it is surprising how the house is still in perfect shape, even still in the hands of the
same family.
6. Villa Planchart. Photo: Jaime Gili, 2006
The house sits in the middle of town but is elevated on a hill, looking out over the cityscape,
but being somehow invisible, hidden from the city itself. Ponti loved the tropical landscape,
he would later even write an interesting seed for a manifesto: “This is my prophecy… Here in
the happiness of the tropics modern architecture will flourish under perfect conditions. In
other places, architecture is a complicated refuge, a shelter over the terrain, here
architecture is a wing under which to live in paradise.”4 Mr and Ms Planchart let Ponti do as
he wished. He furnished the house almost entirely with his choice of objects, which
obviously included many of his own designs: Cutlery and vases he had previously designed
and manufactured, ultraleggera chairs, sofas and appliqués, but also specially designed
tableware and furniture, which in turn were often cleverly designed to accommodate or
hide objects that Ponti didn´t really like, but which had to live inside the house, such as TV
sets and hunting heads. When entering the house one may think that the only spaces which
Ponti left blank, were to be filled with either Anala´s many Orchids, or with their growing art
collection.
4 Ponti, Gio. Amate L´Architettura. Rizzoli, Milano 2008. Quoted from Pereira, Rafael in Arquitectura Con El Paraiso Terrenal
Como Entorno: La Quinta "El Cerrito" De Gio Ponti in http://www.analitica.com/archivo/vam1997.02/habitat.htm
7,8,9 Inside Villa Planchart
Like it happens in other Latin American countries with mixed cultural origins, it is quite
normal for the Venezuelan elite to mix fine art and popular arts and crafts in their homes.
You can often see bright lacquered novelties next to pre‐Columbian or indigenous and rural
objects, and so the collection of the Planchart’s had Reverón elegantly hanging next to local
and international abstraction: Arp, Calder, Otero.
10 Gio Ponti plan of Villa Planchart 1950´s
It is not surprising either that Ponti was taken to visit Reverón in one of his trips to
Venezuela. The excess of Villa Planchart and the humility of El Castillete are miles apart, and
we don’t really know if Ponti and Reverón actually met, as the latter was probably in
hospital by then, but we do know that the Italian was quite interested in Reverón as a
character, and in his house as the most authentic example of local tropical architecture, set
somewhere between Laugier´s primitive hut and a medieval walled citadel. In the
postcolonial beginnings of this nation, Ponti´s Villa Planchart represent an allegedly
universal, foreign idea about how tropical life could be, whilst Reverón´s Castillete is the
local version of tropical, one that may be just as utopian but comes from within. When Ponti
arrived home he asked Graziano Gasparini, the local Italian‐Venezuelan photographer and
architect who mediated between Ponti´s office and the local builders, to draw a sketchy
plan of El Castillete. The result is this beautiful drawing, which shows the studio as the
central space and rooms with different functions around it.
11. Graziano Gasparini. Plan of El Castillete, 1950´s
Perhaps following the local buzz around the show that Reverón was about to have in the
Fine Arts Museum in Caracas, Ponti published a story on Reverón and El Castillete in Domus
in June 1954, with the pictures that Gasparini took, and his plan. That was just a few months
before Reverón died. As it shows, some trees occupy the land, and the separate spaces for
different activities indicate that life takes place inside as much as outside, under a palm, or
under a canvas, wicker or palm roof. From the central space, the studio ‐where paintings
famously hung from the ceiling to avoid dust and humidity‐ looking east, light filtered in
through a wall of canes. This is probably the point of view for the painting “Luz tras mi
enramada” (translated sometimes as “light behind my arbour”). Morning light is painted
with white oil directly on the un‐primed jute. When looking at this painting, you can
probably feel the heat of the new day on the coast at about 8 am, the moment when the
precarious shading devices can hardly keep the cool of the night inside and it’s time to go
out. This is one of my favourite paintings of his, and one that links with many future
moments of Venezuelan painting with its incipient abstraction.
12. Armando Reverón, Luz tras mi Enramada, 1926
One of the possible connections is with the cinético, a movement which existed during the
1950´s between Caracas and Paris, including artists such as Carlos Cruz Diez, Alejandro
Otero or Jesús Rafael Soto. A grand work by the latter today occupies one of the blank
spaces left by Ponti at Villa Planchart, a work with yellow and white parallel metal bars that
hang near the angled ceiling, at a height where they often vibrate with the high cross‐breeze
from the natural ventilation system of the house.
13, 14. Inside Villa Planchart
Not only the formal aspects of this and other works from Soto ‐vertical white lines half
hiding what’s behind them‐ fancies being compared with “Luz tras mi enramada”, but also
the idea of things somehow vanishing. We think Reverón learned from the excess of light in
the coast, the way it often doesn’t let you see things clearly; Soto too, coming from a town
in the flatlands in the south of the country, often spoke directly about things disappearing.
He tells stories about the air vibrating due to the sun heating the earth of the plains, making
things disappear in the landscape, or a strong fever he had as a child, which generated visual
hallucinations in which people disappeared in a central point of light. Throughout his career,
parallel lines, often black and white, are a vibrating background to make it more difficult to
define the things that float in front of them. He knew how to produce those vibrations
mechanically, in manufactured works towards the end of his life, with screen‐printed lines
or metal tubes and very flat colours, but he would never abandon a loyalty to the “art
informel” that was big in Paris in the forties and fifties, and so also never stopped using
handmade lines and more organic vibrations, which are just as effective, in series like his
escrituras (writings) where wire shapes hang in front of the lines disappearing when
movement occurs.
15, 16. . Jesús Rafael Soto, “Structure Blanche”, 1960 And “Sin título” 1956
These hand painted or screen‐printed lines, perfectly parallel or not, are mostly black and
white in Soto´s work, and colour is also reduced elsewhere. We could say that for Soto
colour was not a subject of research, but light was. His palette, in a Mondrianesque way,
was limited throughout his life to a tone of yellow, a vermillion, one dark shade of cobalt
blue, and an olive green, apart from the black and white. He recalls his teachers in Caracas,
in his beginnings, pushing him to “see the violet tones hidden in the shades”… which he
confesses he never saw, but painted anyway, only realising later that the teachers belonged
to a French impressionist school, even if they never set a foot in Europe.5
His Penetrables, massive structures of hanging elements can be entered by the viewer, show
the idea of disappearance with extreme clarity, as the viewer that enters seems to vanish
from the other viewer’s eyes. These structures also, to my view, relate beautifully to some
of Reverón´s paintings and even with El Castillete as a whole, with its square shape, its
whiteness and its shadow tricks when installed outdoors.
5 In Jiménez, Ariel Conversaciones con Jesús Soto. Colección Cisneros, Caracas 2005 p. 501
17. Jesús Rafael Soto, “Penetrable Blanco” Photo: Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, Ciudad Guayana
Soto differentiates a Parisian, impressionist “silver light” from the tropical light that he
cannot or does not describe, somehow self depreciatingly towards his origins. Talking
specifically about Reverón, Soto contradicts himself in one interview. He says that he does
not believe Reverón painted those white paintings because he was representing that
“blinding light of the tropics”, that had nothing to do with it, perhaps the light isn´t actually
blinding anyway: Reverón had it inside himself to paint like that, and he would have done it
anywhere.6 Yet in the same interview Soto speaks of the “silver light” as almost the sole
thing that could have ever originated Impressionism and Monet as its discoverer. Soto was
not interested in his own rural origins, or even in tying works to local characteristics, only in
advancing painting towards the future. Because of Reverón´s late entrance into art history,
the documents that can be found often place a journalistic interest in anecdotes and not in
specific painterly subjects, so there are no quotes I can bring about his relationship to light.
The quotes that can be found by him are often aphorisms, exaggerated fragmented
emphasised by journalists to leave no doubts about his mental disorder.
And yet, I can understand Soto feeling tired of people always wanting to know where your
colours come from as if painters were automatons. It is interesting to me how in the public
imagination artists are rebels and often have to, or want to, go against the grain, but colour‐
wise –instead‐ the same public imagination thinks that they must adapt like chameleons to
the space where they work, and cannot flee the imposition of its colour and light. As a
painter working both in England and in Venezuela I am often, on both sides of the Atlantic,
6 Ibidem
asked about the subject. How can I work with such bright colours if I live in England? The
question to me would rather be what do I like to look at. I often explain that even if it was
true that grey and mist is always over London, as it happens in people’s imagination, I tend
to want to stand out with brighter colours, and I do look for (and create) things that do
stand out, just like advertising, ambulances, flowers and sports clothes.
18. Jaime Gili. Las Tres Calaveras, Instalation view. Periférico Caracas, 2006
Mist is in fact quoted as a possible interest in Reverón by Pérez‐Oramas7, mist that blurs and
hides, and which was nowhere to be seen in Reveron´s coast. Things do not disappear in my
paintings as they do in Soto or Reverón, but because of my origin, my work will always be
related to that of other cinéticos such as Carlos Cruz Diez or Alejandro Otero. For Soto´s
fellow Venezuelan‐Parisian Cruz‐Diez, colour is all there is. His large commissions still can be
found in and around Caracas as he was extremely generous with the city, and it must be
said, the country and its institutions were extremely inclined to the this type of abstraction
when commissioning permanent works in the sixties, seventies and even well into the
eighties, creating a tradition of integrating art and architecture which continues today.
7 Pérez‐Oramas, Luis. Ibid. p.100
19. Carlos Cruz Diez, inside a new versión of his “chromosatiuration”
In Cruz Diez´s best known works, the vibration of adjacent bars of colour create new colours.
His work is often about what happens in the eye with the perception of colour, about how
we see, and how a new image appears in the eye. Taking these works to the public scale
only accentuates this.
21, 21. . Carlos Cruz Diez. Aeropuerto Simón Bolívar, 1974 and Silos at Santo Domingo Port. Dominican Rep. c.1980
From bank lobbies to airport halls, silos to stadiums, turbine halls to zebra crossings, Cruz
Diez, at ninety, still loves a challenge. Of course some interventions have aged better than
others, as it is never up to the artist to supervise who is going to maintain the work in the
future. Some of them, like his piece at the airport, is still in good shape after almost half a
century, as the original mosaic was made to last and people cherish it. Instead others, like
the one he was invited to do for the river (or rather the open air sewer) that crosses
Caracas, was hardly going to help the view, improve the quality of life, or (therefore) be
maintained or protected.
22, 23.. Two views of Cruz Diez “Color Aditivo” Caracas 1975. Photos: Jaime Gili, 2007
This maintenance aspect is key with regard to some changes I have seen in public art
recently. In England commissioners have learned that it is easier to control this aspect, as
well as the question of budgeting, if public commissions are not permanent but temporary.
The downside is how difficult it is to get a permanent work made. In Venezuela it is the
opposite, and commissioners launch themselves into a permanent commission without
really planning its maintenance, as there are still so many things to do and there’s a
desperate need to improve spaces and the quality of life of the people.
24. Jaime Gili. “Diamante de las Semillitas”. Photo: Carlos Germán Rojas, 2011
The most recent commission I did in Caracas tries to work in this direction. It consists of
solid diamond shaped blocks of colour, as if fallen from the sky into and around a baseball
training ground for children in a Barrio. Petare is one of the biggest informal communities in
the world, and the work was installed around one of the many gates into it. The work is
visible from the underground train exit, and the plaques are accessible by anyone going up
the stairs. A great deal of work was done with the community to ensure the maintenance of
the whole park, and so far there has been a great sense of pride about the work. Materials
used, therefore, were the most readily available, weld‐able stainless steel and easily
restorable paint. I imagined colours working as codes for children playing baseball, as
inevitably they would want to hit them. I also found out that most of these houses are built
from the inside, which means it is very difficult to render the walls, so when we brought the
scaffold to install the work, they asked us insistently to render and paint their walls too,
which we did despite some of the plaques being painted white to contrast with the red of
the bricks as they were. Although similar in colours and shapes, works such as the one for
the Bloomberg Space in London, have completely different end users. The vinyl display in
this case was designed with a central eye “watching“ everything from the fourth floor, but
the vision from the atrium is of many fragments around the space. From inside the offices
the fragments are almost personal to every worker on every desk, due to their scale and
variations.
25. 21Jaime Gili. “Mashrabiya”, Bloomberg Space, 2009
Finally, another temporary work, executed in summer 2012 at Tynemouth Metro station, a
newly restored Victorian jewel in the famous coastal town, would like to follow Cruz Diez’s
steps in the use of repetition and reflected colour.
26. Jaime Gili. “Posters for Posts”. Tynemouth, 2012
Due to budgetary limitations, the project went from vinyl covering the whole roof, as in the
Bloomberg work, to finally using the many columns and covering them with cylindrical
posters to bring about an enhanced awareness of the architecture, and somehow change
the feeling of the whole station with minimum means.
Bright pure Magenta, Cyan and Yellow were used to maximise brightness, adding Victorian
green and an off‐white tone to melt in with the uncovered parts of the station and its
original colours. A picture shows the station at the end of the 19th Century with plants and
flowers not only high up on every column, but also in certain enclosed areas. In a way I
thought that the colours selected are bright for the same reason as the colours of the
flowers back then. Standing out, not disappearing. Mucho color for a place with poquita luz.
List of Images:
1st text page image: Armando Reverón “El Árbol” (The Tree), 1937
1. Reverón with Juanita at “El Castillete”. Photo: Victoriano de los Ríos, c.1949. Col. FGAN, Caracas
2. Armando Reverón. Playa de Macuto, 1940 ‐ Private Collection
3. Armando Reverón. Marina, 1927 ‐ Fundación Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas
4. Reverón with Dolls. Photo: Victoriano de Los Ríos c.1949‐50
5. Reverón painting a portrait of Luisa Phelps. Photo: Alfredo Boulton, 1934
6. Villa Planchart. Photo: Jaime Gili, 2006
7. Villa Planchart, details of the house with a painting by Alejandro Otero.
8. Gio Ponti, crockery for Villa Planchart, with the AA for Anala and Armando. 1950´s Unknown picture.
9. Living room with TV and cabinets that hide hunting heads. Photo: Jaime Gili 2006
10. Gio Ponti plan of Villa Planchart 1950´s
11. Graziano Gasparini. Plan of El Castillete, 1950´s
12. Armando Reverón, Luz tras mi Enramada, 1926.
13. Villa Planchart, drawing room. Photo: Unknown
14. Villa Planchart, Lounge with work by Jessús Soto in the background. Photo: Unknown
15. Jesús Rafael Soto, “Structure Blanche”, 1960. Collection Hélène Soto. ADAGP, Paris
16. Jesús Rafael Soto, “Sin título (Untitled)” 1956. Collection Hélène Soto. ADAGP, Paris
17. Jesús Rafael Soto, “Penetrable Blanco” Photo: Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, Ciudad Guayana
18. Jaime Gili. Las Tres Calaveras, Instalation view. Periférico Caracas, 2006 Archivo Jaime Gili
19. Carlos Cruz Diez, inside his cromosatiuration, Cruz Diez Archive, Paris
20. Carlos Cruz Diez. Aeropuerto Simón Bolívar, Maiquetía, 1970´s. Cruz Diez Archive, Paris
21. Carlos Cruz Diez, Silos at Santo Domingo Port. Dominican Republic, 1980´s
22. Carlos Cruz Diez, Color Aditivo, Caracas 1975. Photo: Jaime Gili, 2007
23. Carlos Cruz Diez, Color Aditivo, Caracas 1975. Photo: Jaime Gili, 2007
24. Jaime Gili. “Diamante de las Semillitas”. Photo: Carlos Germán Rojas, 2011 Archivo Jaime Gili
25. Jaime Gili. “Mashrabiya”, Bloomberg Space, 2009 Archivo Jaime Gili
26. Jaime Gili. “Posters for Posts”. Tynemouth, 2012. Archivo Jaime Gili
Bibliography:
Boulton, Alfredo. Cruz Diez. Armitano, Caracas, 1975
Elderfield, John, with essays by John Elderfield, Nora Lawrence, and Luis Pérez‐Oramas
Armando Reverón. MoMA, 2007
Jiménez, Ariel. Conversation with Jesús Soto. Fundación Cisneros, Caracas, 2005
Ponti, Gio. Amate L´Architettura. Rizzoli, Milano, 2008
Ponti, Gio. "Reverón, o la vita allo stato di sogno" Domus 296. Milano, July 1954
Ramírez, Mari Carmen, Carlos Cruz Diez, Color in space and time. Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2011
Vegas, Federico. Los Incurables. Editorial Alfa, Caracas, 2011