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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Films about Reverón during his lifetime were made in 1951 by Margot Benacerraf; in 1945 by Roberto Lucca and in 1929 by Edgar Anzola

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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

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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/

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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.

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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.

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Reverón with Juanita at “El Castillete”. Photo: Victoriano de los Ríos, c.1949. Col. FGAN, Caracas Armando Reverón. Playa de Macuto, 1940 ‐ Private Collection Armando Reverón. Marina, 1927 ‐ Fundación Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas Reverón with Dolls. Photo: Victoriano de Los Ríos c.1949‐50 Reverón painting a portrait of Luisa Phelps. Photo: Alfredo Boulton, 1934

Villa Planchart. Photo: Jaime Gili, 2006 Villa Planchart, details of the house with a painting by Alejandro Otero.

Gio Ponti, crockery for Villa Planchart, with the AA for Anala and Armando. 1950´s Unknown picture.

Living room with TV and cabinets that hide hunting heads. Photo: Jaime Gili 2006 Gio Ponti plan of Villa Planchart 1950´s Graziano Gasparini. Plan of El Castillete, 1950´s Armando Reverón, Luz tras mi Enramada, 1926.

Villa Planchart, drawing room. Photo: Unknown Villa Planchart, Lounge with work by Jessús Soto in the background. Photo: Unknown Jesús Rafael Soto, “Structure Blanche”, 1960. Collection Hélène Soto. ADAGP, Paris Jesús Rafael Soto, “Sin título (Untitled)” 1956. Collection Hélène Soto. ADAGP, Paris Jesús Rafael Soto, “Penetrable Blanco” Photo: Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, Ciudad Guayana Jaime Gili. Las Tres Calaveras, Instalation view. Periférico Caracas, 2006 Archivo Jaime Gili Carlos Cruz Diez, inside his cromosatiuration, Cruz Diez Archive, Paris Carlos Cruz Diez. Aeropuerto Simón Bolívar, Maiquetía, 1970´s. Cruz Diez Archive, Paris Carlos Cruz Diez, Silos at Santo Domingo Port. Dominican Republic, 1980´s Carlos Cruz Diez, Color Aditivo, Caracas 1975. Photo: Jaime Gili, 2007 Carlos Cruz Diez, Color Aditivo, Caracas 1975. Photo: Jaime Gili, 2007 Jaime Gili. “Diamante de las Semillitas”. Photo: Carlos Germán Rojas, 2011 Archivo Jaime Gili Jaime Gili. “Mashrabiya”, Bloomberg Space, 2009 Archivo Jaime Gili 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