Alejandro Otero. Ortogonal (Collage) 1

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MEGAN SULLIVAN

In October 1951, Ellsworth Kelly and Alejandro Otero, young expat artists frequenting the same Parisian circles, both began constructing gridded collages of industrially produced colored papers. Although meant simply as provisional studies for new ways of arranging color, these collages mark important turning points in the trajectory of each artist’s work. Kelly’s collages would lead later that year to Colors for a Large Wall , a large grid composed of sixty-four brightly colored panels arranged by chance. In retrospect, this work stands as an early harbinger of two key developments in both Kelly’s work and in postwar painting in the United States in general: the substitution of color as commodity for the historical avant- garde’s spiritual and scientific theories, and a final effort to reengage with avant-garde aspirations to architectural integration and collective reception (aspi - rations that Kelly and other artists of the 1950s would quickly abandon). In those humble collages of industrial color lay the seeds of a radically new and disen - chanted approach to postwar abstraction. Otero had great admiration for Kelly during their time together in France (referring to him as “the most mature among us”), but the Venezuelan’s collages were driven by a different set of concerns and would lead in quite a different direc - tion. 1 For Otero, as for Kelly, these works represent his earliest efforts to experiment with non-referential, industrial color and the grid as a non-mimetic organizational matrix for color. Yet upon his return to Caracas in early 1952, Otero would forsake his painting practice for several years in order to dedicate himself entirely to collabo - rating on the new, modernist building programs sprouting up throughout the city. Throwing himself into the creation of public spaces, he also moved away from the non-referential colors of his Parisian work. While inspired by the gridded collages, Otero’s 1956 monumental polychrome façade for the Faculty of Architecture in

* My profound thanks Benjamin Buchloh for his input and support through several drafts of this essay, and to Robin Greeley and Tom Cummins for their guidance and insights. 1. Rachel Adler and Alejandro Otero, “An Interview with Alejandro Otero by Rachel Adler,” in Alejandro Otero: A Retrospective Exhibition , exh. cat. (Austin, TX: Michener Galleries, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, 1975), p. 19. It is unclear exactly how well Otero and Kelly were acquaint - ed; Otero mentions Kelly on occasion in his letters from the time, and Kelly sent works to the inaugur - al exhibition at the Venezuelan gallery Cuatro Muros in 1952, but language barriers likely prevented any sustained exchange.

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Ellsworth Kelly. Colors for a Large Wall . 1951. © Ellsworth Kelly. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Caracas’s newly constructed University City (his self-declared greatest achievement among these interventions) makes an explicit nod to the color of the work’s immedi - ate natural surroundings; he chose the lighter of the work’s massive grid of alternating blues, constructed of industrially produced glass mosaic tiles, to coincide with the brilliant hue of the Caracas sky at certain times of the day and year. The ambiguity of this interplay with the environment—reinforced concrete is optically dissolved while the sky is marshaled into a rigid grid structure—points to larger ten - sions between raw materials and finished products, and even nature and history, that characterized Venezuela’s efforts to forge a modern art that was at once national and up to date. In Otero’s façade, color emerged as a potential way of bridging the nat - ural world—the source of the nation’s emerging oil wealth—and the advanced technologies and consumer products into which the state sought to convert that oil. Whereas Kelly’s adoption of an anti-aesthetic approach to color would continue upon his return to the United States and would foretell color’s complete break with its earlier grounding in nature, Otero’s homecoming inspired him to put color back in dialogue with nature. The result was an approach to color that embraced its inevitable industrialization even while refusing to sever its natural referents. For Otero, I will argue, color became a way of reconciling the historical rifts endemic both to the experience of colonialism and to Venezuela’s particular form of postwar de vel op men talism.

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A Return to Local Color When Otero returned to Caracas after more than six years abroad, he found a country in the midst of transformation. Venezuela had remained a largely rural, agri - cultural country well into the twentieth century, but the military government that came into power in 1948 initiated a concerted effort to convert Venezuela’s newfound oil wealth into the visible trappings of modernity. The University City, for which Otero’s polychrome work would be created, was begun in the early 1940s, a few years before the government of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez took control, but it nonetheless stands, in the words of Luis Pérez-Oramas, as a fitting emblem of the hopes and failures of Venezuela’s “will to be modern” that defined the 1950s. 2 Designed by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva as the campus for the Universidad Central de Venezuela and built between 1944 and 1977, the city within a city represents one of the more successful attempts to adapt International Style architecture to tropical climates and stands as a tes - tament to the mid-century dream (which cut across the political spec - trum) of imposing modernity on underdeveloped nations through planning. The project is perhaps most celebrated as an accomplished Top: Carlos Raúl Villanueva and 2. Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, “La Alejandro Otero (facade). School of voluntad moderna,” in Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Architecture, Universidad Central de un moderno en Sudamérica, ed. William Niño Venezuela, Caracas. 1952 –60. Ararque (Caracas: Galería de Arte Nacional, Photograph by Paolo Gasparini. Courtesy 1999), n.p. of Fundación Villanueva, Caracas. Bottom: Villanueva and Otero. School of Architecture, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas. 1952 –60. Photograph by Megan Sullivan.

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example of the synthesis of the arts, of which Villanueva was an enthusiastic advo - cate. Artists from throughout Europe and the Americas, including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Antoine Pevsner, and Victor Vasarely, con - tributed sculptures and murals, while the Venezuelan artists who had worked with Villanueva on his Corbusian residential complexes also designed glass mosaic poly - chromes for the buildings’ façades. Otero’s work for the School of Architecture consisted of two monumental designs for the blind east and west façades, as well as repeated black and white stripes throughout smaller sections of the exterior. The west façade—the primary focus of this study—is covered by a regular, eight-by- eight grid; in each row, the two shades of blue alternate, either module by module or, in alternating rows, doubled into paired modules of the same color. 3 The four top rows begin with the lighter tiles on the left extreme and end with the dark ones; the pattern is inverted for the bottom four. The subtle directional rhythm of the repeated pattern disturbs the regularity of the modular grid, lending a sense of movement to the static architectural form. In analyzing Otero’s earlier poly - chrome in red, green, and blue for the residential housing block El Paraíso, Juan Ledezma contends that the rhythm of color forces “the fixity of structure” to yield to the “temporal distention of the event.” 4 Ledezma’s argument deftly accounts for the relation between the optical rhythms of color and the architectural object, but how does the presence of a third element—color’s natural referent—compli - cate the picture? The significance of the polychrome for the Faculty of Architecture’s color lies in the unique co-presence of sign and referent—the proximity of bright blue sky and blue mosaic tiles. Mimicking on the façade the segment of the sky that the building obscures, the blue tiles both represent and replace the environment. On the one hand, the concrete building seems to dissolve under the intense light and color of the tropical sun, as if overpowered by natural forces. On the other hand, nature retreats from view, transformed into concrete color. In both cases, the blues function indexically, pointing to their referent only within the precise con - text of their enunciation. These blues are thus emphatically local, circumscribing their meaning to the act of referencing. Otero, then, would seem to have aban - doned the non-referential color of the Parisian collages, as well as the universalizing aspirations of his Parisian project, in an act of concession to the overwhelming color and light of the tropics. His acknowledgment through color of the intensity of that blue sky further underscored Villanueva’s references to tropical reality in the form of covered walkways, interior courtyards, and brise- soleil. The reflection of intense tropical light in the glass tiles (used throughout

3. The east façade bears the same pattern of alternating blues, but an external staircase run - ning up the left side interrupts the pattern. The north and south façades are dominated by windows, so Otero’s interventions there are more limited. 4. Juan Ledezma, “Beyond Positivism, Toward Integration: The Urban Geometries of Alejandro Otero and Carlos Raúl Villanueva,” in Resonant Space: The Colorhythms of Alejandro Otero , ed. Rina Carvajal (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2014), p. 48.

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the campus to protect the surface of the buildings) only increases the vibration that Ledezma argues for in the earlier painted polychrome façades, further undo - ing the stability of the concrete architecture and undermining the imposition of geometric rigidity onto both the natural environment and its human inhabitants. The domination of nature over modern architecture (a sign of Venezuela’s will to modernity) would seem overwhelming.

The Promise and Threat of Nature Although a notable turn away from the 1951 collages and their emphasis on non-referential color, Otero’s attention to the local specificities of the natural world—and the excesses of tropical light in particular—is rooted in his early artis - tic training and the history of modern Venezuelan painting as a whole. In a 1975 article on Otero’s work, critic and journalist Roberto Montero Castro went so far as to argue: Light is the common denominator of great Venezuelan painting and is the most characteristic element . . . of our collective identity, of our relationship with the physical environment, with nature. It is light that inscribes us in Venezuelan-ness. A light that is completely different from that of Europe or North America. And all of our great artists try to reconstruct reality starting from light. 5 Although landscape painting was virtually nonexistent in Venezuela during the colonial and early independence periods, it emerged as the genre of choice for artists rebelling against the staid academic training that persisted into the 1920s. The eccentric and enigmatic Armando Reverón—Venezuela’s first great modern painter—fled Caracas for the beach town of Macuto, recording the blinding tropi - cal sunlight’s capacity to dissolve form and color. In a series of coastal landscapes from the 1920s and ’30s, the sheer force of equatorial light corrodes contour and depth; all that remains to indicate the subject of the paintings is a haze of white paint through which bits of raw canvas sporadically reveal themselves. Although often less accomplished than Reverón, students at the School of Plastic and Applied Arts in Caracas (where Otero studied and taught in the early 1940s) churned out endless renditions of El Ávila, the monumental, uninhabited moun - tain that towers over the city of Caracas, separating it from the sea. Within a gen - eration, the long-neglected genre of landscape painting came to dominate the country’s first experiments in modern painting. Luis Pérez-Oramas has even argued that hidden away within the vibration and saturated color of 1960s kinetic works by Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez lay an effort to re-create, albeit in a radical -

5. Roberto Montero Castro, “Visión del mundo a través de la luz,” Resumen 9, no. 104 (November 1975), pp. 50–51; repr. in Alejandro Otero ante la crítica: Voces en el sendero plástico (Caracas: Artesano Group Editores, 2006), p. 139. All translations by the author unless otherwise noted.

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ly delocalized form, the light of the tropics. 6 Critics at the time saw the late arrival and meteoric rise of landscape painting as a belated effort to parrot turn-of-the-centu - ry French painting, and the growing knowledge of French Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting certainly did influence the turn toward plein air paint - ing. 7 But the emerging Venezuelan landscape tra - dition of the second quar - ter of the twentieth centu - Armando Reverón. El árbol. 1931. ry reveals an attitude Courtesy of Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. toward nature markedly different from those embodied by their French counterparts. The Venezuelan corpus is populated by neither pastorals nor idylls, and we find neither Seurat’s resignation toward man’s alienation from the natural world nor Matisse’s imagining of an Edenic harmony between the two. The centuries-long de facto prohibition against land - scape painting in much of Latin America was a result, at least in part, of a dis - comfort with what were understood as the barbaric forces of tropical nature and a fear of its effects on the region’s inhabitants. In 1931,the acclaimed writer and president of Venezuela Rómulo Gallegos referred to Venezuela as “God’s land,” clarifying that this was not a term of adulation but rather a description of a young land, “still hot from the warmth of the creator’s hand, where the civilizing forces of man have not yet had time to work.” 8 Nature remained as much a threat as a promise to the maturation of the Venezuelan nation, which was full

6. Luis Pérez-Oramas, “The Cisneros Collection: From Landscape to Location,” in Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps Cisneros Collection , exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001), p. 56. 7. Reviewing an exhibition in 1933, the critic Alfredo Boulton wrote, “Impressionism is only now peeking through in Venezuela. All the other trends that have been accepted in Europe and in North America are in practice unknown to our artists.” Alfredo Boulton (Bruno Plá, pseudonym), “La pintura venezolana como valor internacional,” El Universal (Caracas), August 1933, repr. and trans. in Alfredo Boulton and His Contemporaries: Critical Dialogues in Venezuelan Art, 1912–1974 , ed. Ariel Jiménez (New York: MoMA, 2008), p. 107. 8. Rómulo Gallegos, “Las tierras de Dios,” in Jiménez, Alfredo Boulton and His Contemporaries , pp. 103–4. Originally delivered as a lecture at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York City, September 1, 1931.

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of potential but still untamed. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that the turn to landscape in the 1920s coincides with the beginning of serious oil explo - ration in Venezuela and the first efforts to forge a collective national identity via oil. The possibility of nature’s instrumentalization, rather than any nostalgia for a lost unity with the natural world, spurred the new view of landscape as an appropriate, and even apt, subject for painting and a source of national identity. It was the beginning of an artistic tradition that would root its commonality and specificity in nature (and in light, above all else), yet would still see the natural world as a source of anxiety, even atavism.

The Years in Paris Until his departure for Paris in late 1945, Otero continued to paint Cézanne- like renditions of the valley of Caracas. He spent some of his final days in Venezuela visiting Reverón in Macuto, paying his respects to the master of tropical light to whom he owed so much. During his long sojourn abroad, however, Otero’s painting progressed rapidly toward abstraction, a process that he would understand as the conversion of local color to pure color. Otero made a pilgrimage to Aix-en-Provence in the spring of 1946, shortly after arriving in France, to see the land—its color and its light—of his first master, Cézanne, but Picasso soon captured his attention. In a series of paintings begun in late 1946, Otero progressed from slavish imitations of Picasso’s mid-1940s still lifes (going so far as to attempt to buy the very same paints) toward more abstract compositions, gradually freeing his lines from the obligation to chart contours and his colors from the need to describe material. These years of experimentation culminated in the 1950–51 series Líneas coloreadas sobre fondo blanco (Colored lines on white ground)—slashes of red, yellow, and blue inscribed more often than not in a white impasto covering part of the canvas. Here line was no longer beholden to a specific object in the world; instead, it was, in the words of Otero, “in search of a new space.” 9 To accompany these experiments, Otero devised a universal history of paint - ing that would support and locate his own breakthrough to abstraction. 10 Although not formally published until his return to Caracas, the 1958 pamphlet entitled Abstract Painting clearly derives from his introduction to the history of modern art while in Paris. New histories of early-twentieth-century European abstraction were springing up all over South America in the 1940s and ’50s, as artists and critics worked to make sense of the rapid developments of those years and to position themselves as the rightful heirs to that legacy. 11 All of these texts marshal some -

9. Otero, quoted in José Balza, Alejandro Otero (Caracas: Armitano, 1982), p. 38. 10. Alejandro Otero, La pintura abstracta (Caracas: Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1958). 11. On one of the most important and accomplished of these histories, written by the Brazilian poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, see Irene V. Small, “Exit and Impasse: Ferreira Gullar and the ‘New History’ of the Last Avant-Garde,” Third Text 26 (February 2012), pp. 91–101.

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times independent and even opposed movements and theories of abstraction into rigidly linear and progressive teleologies that rush impatiently toward the present. But what distinguishes Otero’s history most notably from competing ver - sions is both where he chooses to begin—with Eugène Delacroix— and the particular force that drives his history forward: color. Most of the South American histories of abstraction begin with Cubism’s radical rupturing of picto - rial space; Otero, by contrast, reads Cubism’s dismissal of color in favor of experiments with space and form as something of a detour in a larger, more significant history centered on color. Otero saw Picasso’s increasing Otero. Candelero. 1947. © 2014 Artists ability to structure pictorial space Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy via color—a skill that Otero would of Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. likewise admire in Robert Delaunay—as his major contribution to early-twentieth-century painting, and in his reading he leaps from Picasso’s 1905 Family of Saltimbanques to the WWII-era still lifes. His interest lay in the connection between the young Picasso, who “had made the flesh of painting vibrate like no one else,” and the mid-century Picasso, who had turned that delicate and atmospheric color into a more sub - stantial and form-giving force, one in which, as Leo Steinberg described it, light enters like “a sharpened ax-blade whose contact causes instantaneous recoil.” 12 “All modern painting will revolve around the principle of pure color,” writes Otero in his history of abstract art, 13 in which he traces the systemization of pure color from Delacroix through Impressionism, Cé zanne, Seurat, and Fauvism. It is Impressionism, Otero tells us, that should be “considered the first real rupture” in the practice of painting since the Renaissance. The Impressionists, he argues, discovered light “as a physical fact . . . as a subject of knowledge.” 14 They took tonal light, still colorless in the painting of the

12. Otero, quoted in Balza, Alejandro Otero, p. 21. Leo Steinberg, “The Skulls of Picasso,” in Other Criteria (London: Oxford University Press , 1972), p. 115. 13. Otero, La pintura abstracta , p. 9. 14. Alejandro Otero, “Hondo testimonio,” El Nacional (Caracas), February 20, 1980; repr. in Memoria crítica , ed. Douglas Monroy and Luisa Pérez Gil (Caracas: Artesano Group Editores, 2008), p. 696.

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Romantics, and turned it into “pure color, the red, blue, violet, orange, green, and yellow that were none other than sunlight decom - posed into its spectrum.” 15 For Otero, “pure color” is equivalent to the colors of the spectrum, and thus root - ed in the light that had influ - enced his early landscape paintings. 16 In the work of Matisse, Otero sees the aban - donment of volume, depth, chiaroscuro, and modeling in favor of the “wild passion for the dynamics of pure color.” 17 Painting, at this juncture, abandons its role of imitator Otero. Líneas coloreadas sobre of nature to take on the task fondo blanco. 1950. © 2014 of acting as nature, in fulfill - Artists Rights Society (ARS), New ing our “vital necessity of York. Courtesy of Colección Patricia 18 Phelps de Cisneros. color.” The text concludes with Otero’s champions of abstraction in the early twentieth century: Kandinsky (the apotheosis of Fauvism), Delaunay (the fulfiller of Seurat and Cézanne), and Mondrian (who furthered the discoveries of Cubism), three artists who were finally able to isolate color from the representation of nature. Of these artists, Mondrian would exercise the greatest influence over Otero during his first experiments with abstraction. In the winter of 1950–51, in the midst of an artistic crisis, Otero journeyed to the Netherlands to see the work of Mondrian in person. Having broken free from representation with the Líneas col - oreadas , Otero recalled finding himself “in need of a grammar” for the ambiguous, atmospheric space that those paintings proposed. 19 Although he already knew

15. Ibid. 16. This is the closest that Otero comes to providing us with a definition of “pure color.” The term has been employed by other artists, including Ellsworth Kelly and Piet Mondrian, but Otero (in contrast to others) seems to define pure color as the colors of the spectrum. He will deviate from that model when he returns to painting in 1955 by including colors that are not part of the spectrum (such as brown). This text was published in 1958, yet Otero does not account for this deviation or redefine pure color in light of it. 17. Otero, La pintura abstracta , p. 11. 18. Ibid. 19. Otero, “Hondo testimonio,” p. 692.

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Mondrian’s work (he had seen the late paintings in New York in November 1945 and others at the 1949 exhibition Les Premiers maîtres de l’art abstrait at the Maeght Gallery in Paris), it only became significant to him at this juncture, faced as he was with the formless abstraction of the most recent paintings. Mondrian’s exclusive use of the primary colors in his paintings from the 1920s onward likely had little impact on Otero’s definition of pure color, which he continued to derive from the spectrum. Otero notes that he had already experimented with primary colors on a white ground before his trip to the Netherlands, and regardless of whether this was derived from his previous knowledge of Mondrian, his understanding of the primaries was radically different. “The whiteness of my canvases,” Otero recounts, referring to the Líneas coloreadas, “seemed more like a dawn that announced better and clearer days ahead. The colors that trace across them were no longer the col - ors of objects but those of light: yellow, blue, red lines.” 20 In addition to speaking of whiteness still in the language of Reverón, his notion of the primary colors as light made visible was a far cry from either Mondrian’s interest in the internal relations of color within the picture plane that make no reference to the external world or his efforts fully to separate color from light. 21 What Mondrian provided was a model of organizing color dynamically via the repetition of equal modules. In Otero’s view, this was the most convincing strategy for capturing and enhancing the movement of Delacroix’s and Seurat’s painting without succumbing to representation. Although Otero does not reference any par - ticular works, his mention of “yellows, blues, pinks, grays” and equal, repeating ele - ments would seem to allude to Mondrian’s 1919 Checkerboard, Light Colors .22 In this painting, the irregular distribution of colors across the regular grid and the sporadic grouping of same-colored units produce a visual dynamism within the static nature of the modular grid. As Carel Blotkamp argues, if Mondrian claims that the compan - ion piece of the same year, Checkerboard, Dark Colors, is a reconstruction of a starry sky (albeit one without a direct referent), then Checkerboard, Light Colors might be under - stood “as a reconstruction of a morning or afternoon sky.” 23 It is fitting that Otero would latch on to Mondrian’s final paintings with an origin in nature; the Neo- Plasticism that came quickly on the heels of the checkerboards was a final and defini - tive rupture with any provisional relationship between art and nature, striving instead for a totalizing model of a world to come. Much as he had skipped over Picasso’s canonical Cubist period to link the Spaniard’s early and late work, Otero

20. Alejandro Otero, “Testimonios sobre la pintura,” Cruz del sur 20 (August 1954), pp. 35–38; repr. in Monroy and Pérez Gil, Memoria crítica , p. 602. 21. On Mondrian’s understanding of the relationship of light to color, see Yve-Alain Bois, “The Iconoclast,” in Piet Mondrian 1872–1944 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), p. 320. 22. Otero, La pintura abstracta, p. 13. It is not clear whether Otero would have been able to see the so-called checkerboard paintings on display in the Netherlands during the winter of 1950–51. The collector Sal Slijper did not donate them to the Gemeentemuseum until 1955, but they had previously been lent to the museum in December 1950. My thanks to Yve-Alain Bois for these details. 23. Carol Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 126.

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seems to have ignored Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism. His interest rather lies in the 1919 checkerboards and the New York paintings of the 1940s, in which he admires how “the repetition at equal intervals of bands of color crossed perpendicularly” produces a powerful dynamism within the space of the painting, leading to a total “visual vibra - tion.” 24 Otero thus focuses on the two moments in Mondrian’s painting in which an optical assault, via flickering and rhythmic repetition, was privileged over flatness, balance, and repose. Mondrian’s work would prove to have two crucial functions for Otero. First, it provided a nonmimetic rationale for structuring color, and therefore for presenting the intensity of the experience of color without reference to specific objects or scenes. In other words, it allowed Otero to break with nature as a ref - erent, something that still seemed to haunt his primary-color slashes of 1950 –51. 25 Second, and just as important, it stood as the culmination of Otero’s continuous, linear, and universal history of modern painting, and therefore as contemporaneity itself. In February 1950, Otero became a founding member of Los Disidentes (the dissidents), a short-lived group of Venezuelan painters, poets, and intellectuals living in Paris who rebelled against the country’s anachronistic official salons and national academy. 26 The pages of the group’s eponymous magazine, published between March and September of that year, are dominated by questions of time and history, along with odes to movement and progress. These young artists declared in strident tones their wish to enter their work, and therefore their country, into the “continuous movement and progress” of “universal time,” thereby rethinking Venezuela’s relationship with “the West.” 27 In an article in the May 1950 issue entitled “On Latin America and the West,” the philosopher J. R. Guillent Pérez argues, “In matters relating to Latin America, Westernization has been overwhelming and absolute.” 28 He insists that there is no use in attempting to recover some authentic sense of cul - ture outside the West; Latin America should instead fully assume the place in the Western order that it was irrevocably granted by the experience of colonial - ism. The cultural destiny of Latin America, he concludes, is to be a “co-partici - pant in the destiny of Western culture” on equal terms with the European nations, and to cease following belatedly in their footsteps. 29 The solution pro -

24. Otero, “Hondo testimonio,” p. 693. 25. Luis Pérez-Oramas characterizes these lines as “vestiages, ruins, and shadows,” implying a residual link to Otero’s representational work of the late 1940s. Pérez-Oramas, La Resistencia de las Sombras: Alejandro Otero y Gego (Caracas: Fundación Cisneros, 2005), pp. 20, 25. 26. The membership of Los Disidentes, even over its short lifetime, was rather fluid. In addition to Otero, its members included the painters Pascual Navarro, Mateo Manaure, Luis Guevara Moreno, Carlos González Bogen, Narciso Debourg, Perán Erminy, Rubén Núñez, Dora Hersen, and Aimée Battistini. J. R. Guillent Pérez, then a student of philosophy, was also a prominent voice in the group. 27. Pascual Navarro, “Los disidentes y sus críticos,” Los Disidentes 5 (September 1950), p. 11. 28. J. R. Guillent Pérez, “Lo latinoamericano y lo occidental,” Los Disidentes 1 (May 1950), pp. 13–16; repr. and trans. in Jiménez, Alfredo Boulton and His Contemporaries , p. 176. 29. J. R. Guillent Pérez, “Los Disidentes de 1948,” Revista Nacional de Cultura (September– October 1965).

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posed by Los Disidentes to the problem of producing an authentic Latin American art was to turn away from the local (which, in their eyes, could pro - vide only the most superficial marks of difference) and to assume a coequal role with Europe in the project of furthering Western civilization. As Guillent Pérez recalled, “We had to make ourselves contemporary. We had to become and pro - ject ourselves into what was the present moment of our Western culture.” 30 Otero would take up this crusade, claiming that the task of the Venezuelan artist at that moment was to “face up to his own time and try to understand his own time.” 31 Otero’s interest in the formal evolution of art, in seeing the history of modern painting as a singular and universal one, amounted to taking on con - temporaneity as a problem. History was useful for him and his colleagues only insofar as it implied a “movement toward the future.” 32 For Otero, Mondrian’s paintings represented the most recent step in the universal progression of art— which he hoped to advance in his own work. Otero was well aware that Mondrian was not a popular subject of study in postwar Paris, and he would recount that dur - ing the late 1940s, “no one in France was talking about Mondrian, still less might one see any of his work.” 33 Nevertheless, Mondrian’s paintings provided him with the sense of contemporaneity that he had sought abroad and that he would seek to replicate at home. Otero’s turn toward pure abstraction in 1950–51, while the end result of a long experimental process, also conformed to Los Disidentes’ embrace of universality as the root of a new Venezuelan culture. This entailed a full-throated rejection of the post-Impressionist landscape painters and even of the master Reverón. Within just a few years, landscape had been replaced by abstraction as the preferred mode of painting, and Los Disidentes’ erstwhile teachers were cast as the embodiment of a retrograde style and myopic localism. Otero’s paper collages of late 1951—his last works before returning home to Venezuela—were the result of his encounter with Mondrian’s paintings and the debates of Los Disidentes. While still holding tight to the Impressionist color theo - ry that he had learned as a landscape painter in Caracas (he refers to the hues of the colored paper as the equivalent of light), 34 Otero had now separated color from the depiction of nature and relocated it within the confines of the grid’s anti-mimetic structure. Despite their humble proportions and materials, these col - lages mark the zenith of Otero’s experiments in Paris; color had been fully sepa - rated from nature and reorganized by the rational structure of the grid. At first Otero conceived of the collages as studies for oil paintings, but he became increasingly intrigued by the shallow relief of his woven paper composi - tions—a spatial content that “challenged its realization on the plane.” 35

30. Ibid. 31. Adler and Otero, “An Interview with Alejandro Otero by Rachel Adler,” p. 16. 32. Otero, “Las ‘Placas al Mérito’ y la juventud,” Los Disidentes 2 (April 1950), p. 10; repr. in Monroy and Pérez Gil, Memoria crítica , p. 65. 33. Otero, quoted in Balza, Alejandro Otero , p. 48. 34. Otero, “Testimonios sobre la pintura,” p. 602. 35. Alejandro Otero, untitled text (1981), in Monroy and Pérez Gil, Memoria crítica , p. 721.

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Fortuitously, Otero’s encounter with these fragments of real space in his collages coincided with news from home that other members of Los Disidentes had begun to collaborate with the architect Villanueva on his project for the University City in Caracas. The generation of young landscape painters who had gone off to Paris in the late 1940s would return to Venezuela in the early ’50s, vowing to replace their previous representations of the valley of Caracas with its wholesale physical transformation. In early 1952, Otero left Paris in the hopes of joining their ranks.

Grid as Landscape The modular façade of the Faculty of Architecture represents Otero’s most fully realized effort to deploy the gridded surfaces that he had first worked out in late 1951 within architectural spaces. Even more significantly, it stands as the most striking meeting of the tropical light that had indelibly branded Otero as Venezuelan and the pure color of his Mondrianesque collages, serving as a culmi - nation of Otero’s experiments with light and color. In the collages, the grid acts primarily as a vehicle for the presentation of pure spectral color, maximizing the dynamic, structuring rhythm that Otero admired in the work of Delaunay and Mondrian, among others. 36 But with the sky—color’s purported referent—also present in the polychrome, the grid seems to dramatize the separation of color from its embodiment in the natural world. Moreover, it divides the spectrum of light into discrete, nameable, industrially produced hues and restricts the fleeting effects of light upon the environment to a stable and permanent vibration. The two shades of blue might evoke the shift - ing colors of the sky as day passes into night, but the natural temporal rhythms of those processes and their effects upon our bodies (telling us when to sleep and wake, for example) are here collapsed into a single moment, equivalent to the time of viewing. This visual enveloping of the viewer in color contrasts sharply with Juan O’Gorman’s teeming tiled murals for the central library on the campus of Mexico City’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México ( UNAM ), built around the same time and in a similar architectural style. In Mexico’s version of the University City, O’Gorman covers the windowless façades of the library’s main vault with symbols and figures from the country’s pre-Columbian and colonial his - tory. Whereas O’Gorman’s façade implies that modernist architecture and the developmentalist programs with which it was associated serve as the culmination of a long historical process, Otero’s insists on the present, in which raw nature morphs into a rational architectural grid seemingly of its own accord and apart from the labors and struggles recorded in history.

36. On the use of the grid as an organizing principle for color, see Lanka Tattersall, “The Color Grid,” in Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art , ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: MoMA, 2012), pp. 300–02.

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Gustavo Saavedra, Juan Martínez de Velasco, and Juan O’Gorman. Central Library, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City. 1952. Photograph by Scanudas.

Otero’s grid, while originating in the collages, takes its precise dimensions from Villanueva’s building. Through deductive structure and repeated pattern, the grid maps the ground on which it lies. The smallest module, found in the rows divided into eight rectangles, mimics the proportions of the façade: one- eighth of the height and one-eighth of the width. While this modular grid res - onates with Villanueva’s modernist building as a whole, it addresses that build - ing primarily as surface or façade, not as inhabitable space. Rather than aban - doning the contemplative and optical paradigm of easel painting for the collec - tive and participatory experience on these new architectural spaces, the poly - chrome seems rather to graft the purely visual address of painting onto public space on a monumental scale. The architectural façade, as Henri Lefebvre observed, has historically played a crucial role in the organization of public space, insofar as it both presents a certain face toward the public while also obfuscating that which goes on behind it. 37 In this case, the façade purports to present exactly what it covers, feigning a literal transparency. But what that seeming transparency obfuscates is architectural space itself, and the social life that takes place within it. Thus rather than being grounded in a concretely defined social space, the viewer is enveloped in a field of vibrating color, inno - cent of history and material specificity. Finally, in replacing a section of the sky with its gridded imitation and natur - al color with its industrially produced equivalent, the polychrome suggests the potential extension of that rationalizing structure in all directions. If the blue façade had at first suggested the dominance of tropical nature over modernist

37. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 99, 273–75.

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architecture, the infinite reach of the regular grid suggests the eventual remaking of nature via a rationalist lens. Like mapping, Otero’s grid flattens and abstracts, making the unbroken continuity of sky nameable, measurable, and exchangeable. To return to the words of Gallegos, color becomes a bridge between God’s land and man’s—between raw nature and the human efforts to rationalize and tame it. The viewer of the polychrome is cast as witness to this transformation, as sky becomes grid.

“To Sow the Oil” Both Otero’s polychrome façade and Villanueva’s architecture projects were part of a much larger frenzy of construction overtaking the capital city in the 1950s—a concerted effort to graft “modernity” onto what was in many ways a still premodern Venezuela. The bulk of this transformation took place under the aus - pices of a military dictatorship led by Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–58), but its aims cut across the ideological spectrum and were more typical of the particular anxieties of an oil nation than of any single political program. 38 Several members of Los Disidentes joined the Communist Party and were later jailed by the Pérez Jiménez government, yet these political enemies agreed, even if not consciously, that Venezuela needed to be inserted into the flow of universal history. At the cen - ter of this effort was oil. Oil had evolved from a minor element of the Venezuelan economy to its primary engine during the long dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908– 1935): Having drilled its first significant wells in the second decade of the centu - ry, by the 1930s Venezuela was the world’s largest oil exporter. World War II, postwar reconstruction, and the explosion of automobile ownership in the United States fueled an increased global demand for oil. As oil profits grew, the Venezuelan government endeavored to wrest control of them away from foreign interests and to position oil at the center of a dream of collective national progress. In 1936, the writer and journalist Arturo Uslar Pietri coined the phrase “to sow the oil,” an expression of the growing belief in the state’s respon - sibility to take control of the country’s natural resources and “construct the nation” from the wealth that oil provided. Although much of Latin America was undergoing a rapid modernization in the 1940s and ’50s, Venezuela’s version differed significantly from that of other nations. Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina had all taken up state-led projects of

38. Recent revisionist historians have argued for a greater continuity between the Pérez Jiménez government and the democratic governments that followed in the 1960s and ’70s, and have ques - tioned earlier models of Venezuelan history structured primarily on shifts from democratic to dictator - ial regimes. On the ruptures and continuities in twentieth-century Venezuelan history, and how they have been both exaggerated and played down in the nation’s historiography, see Steve Ellner, “Venezuelan Revisionist Political History, 1908–1958: New Motives and Criteria for Analyzing the Past,” Latin American Research Review 30, no. 2 (1995), pp. 91–121.

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import-substitution industrialization, which focused on growing domestic produc - tion capacity as a way of breaking with Latin America’s colonial pattern of export - ing primary products and importing finished products from industrial centers. This accelerated effort to industrialize (summed up neatly in the Brazilian presi - dent Juscelino Kubitschek’s slogan “Fifty Years of Progress in Five”) led to the for - mation of new working classes, a flurry of new construction, increasing urbaniza - tion, and restrictions on foreign imports. Brazilians, Argentines, and Mexicans were called to the factories to produces shoes, clothing, and automobiles, and to the new shopping centers to consume those domestically produced commodities. For Venezuela, coming into its own as an oil nation during the postwar boom years, the path to development would be quite different. Rather than a push toward industrial development and all that went along with it, Venezuela’s new economy was based almost exclusively on the extraction of oil for sale abroad. As it was exported from Venezuela unprocessed upon extraction, oil itself had little visi - ble presence in the country. Even on a large scale, oil extraction requires relative - ly little labor, and it fails to reshape cities, classes, and daily life in the way that massive industrialization efforts inevitably do. Oil presented itself to the Venezuelan people as pure exchange value—as a way of obtaining the foreign manufactured goods that the country was incapable of producing. 39 It was simulta - neously a commodity that allowed Venezuela to purchase the most up-to-date goods and technologies and a reminder of its inability to produce those goods. Although the national territory held the key to the country’s prosperity and therefore would become central to its national imagination, it was the state, which was then steeped in nineteenth-century positivism, that took on the task of con - verting raw nature into a material environment befitting a wealthy nation, one “better adapted to the demands of civilization” thanks to its oil wealth. 40 The anthropologist Fernando Coronil has described Venezuela qua oil nation as having two bodies: “a political body made up of its citizens and a natural body made up of its rich subsoil.” 41 In this schema, the state emerged as the “tran - scendent and unifying agent” of the nation insofar as it owned and administered the natural body for the common good of the political body. 42 The state took it upon itself to connect the nation’s two bodies by placing the natural body’s wealth at the service of the development of its people. The newly established notion of oil as the basis of the national wealth and the state as the keeper of that wealth

39. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 35. 40. Ocarina Castillo D’Imperio, Los años del buldozer: ideología y política 1948–1958 (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Tropykos/Asociación de Profesores U.C.V./CENDES, 1990), p. 106. Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, one of the primary architects of the government’s plans to administer the oil wealth, wrote explicitly in 1955: “We are, in a way, Saint-Simonians and technocrats.” Vallenilla Lanz, El Heraldo , June 27, 1955. Quoted in Castillo D’Imperio, p. 110. 41. Coronil, The Magical State , p. 4. 42. Ibid.

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formed the foundation of a developing discourse of national identity directly related to oil. 43 This link between nation and oil was not forged until the 1930s, but it quickly took on a timeless quality, one that involved an implicit disavowal of pre-Columbian and colonial history, as well as of the enduring effects of colonial - ism’s social and political institutions. Inequities and injustices grounded in race and class were understood to have been erased by a new image of “collective fecundity” that would benefit the social body understood as a single, indivisible whole. 44 The result was a model of social progress grounded not in individual labor or the atomized interests of private individuals, but rather in the common ownership of the national subsoil. 45 The state saw itself as “the absolute integra - tion of the interests and aspirations of the Venezuelan people.” 46 The primary refrain of Pérez Jiménez’s positivist and technocratic “New National Ideal,” a somewhat vague development plan and governing philosophy first presented in 1955, was “the transformation of the physical environment and the moral, intellectual, and material improvement of the country’s inhabitants.” 47 The government’s efforts to “construct the nation” implied both a land and a peo - ple without history or tradition, and a concept of a nation-in-the-making that made no recourse to ideas of shared culture, religion, history, language, or ethnic - ity. In the eyes of the government, there existed a state without a nation. It would thus become the task of the state to forge a nation via the rational and judicious use of the material wealth hidden in the subsoil of its physical environment. 48 The Pérez Jiménez government, like the governments that would follow, took it upon itself to “transform the natural body” into a civilized “material habitat” that would, in turn, lead to civilized inhabitants. 49 This raw, unprocessed material, the mark of a young land and an even younger country (“God’s land”), had kept Venezuela out of the flow of history, understood as a forward march of technical progress and material achievements. Like Los Disidentes’ anxiety about being behind the times in terms of the history of art, the state saw a similar delay in the country’s development. Pérez Jiménez strove to execute this transformation by means of monumental construction projects and the importation of consumer goods that would effectively transport the concrete markers of “modernity” onto Venezuelan soil. Whereas these “modern” products and structures may have been the conse - quences of certain developments in a European or North American context, in Venezuela they were understood as causes of transition, capable of developing and

43. Ibid., p. 81. 44. Ibid., p. 134. 45. Ibid., p. 88. 46. Castillo D’Imperio, Los años del buldozer , p. 103. 47. Ibid. , p. 61. 48. The phrase “ medio físico ” (“physical environment”) recurs regularly in government publica - tions of the mid-1950s related to its overarching program of the “New National Ideal.” It seems to refer both to the nation’s natural oil deposits and the new, constructed environment that would be built with it. See Castillo D’Imperio, Los años del buldozer . 49. Coronil, The Magical State , p. 168.

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modernizing the Venezuelan population. 50 In granting highways, city plans, mod - ernist architecture, and even refrigerators the status of agents, the state shifted the locus of historical agency from the nation’s social body to a collection of objects and structures—the wealth of its natural body made visible. 51 In such a model, where nature and state come together to construct the nation, the people as a whole are cast as mere spectators to their country’s seeming - ly magical transformation of raw materials into capital and finished consumer prod - ucts. Along with the denial of history and the insistence on the relative youth of the emerging Venezuelan nation in the rhetoric of the moment—a disavowal brought into even sharper relief when compared to O’Gorman’s cloaking of UNAM ’s mod - ernist library in the images of Mexico’s long, albeit fraught, history—went a denial of the constructive labor of its people. Venezuela’s construction boom invites com - parisons to Brasília, the new capital that rose from the barren plateau of central Brazil in just over three years in the late 1950s. Brasília, too, was the result of the state’s profound belief in the power of planning and a product of the influence of Le Corbusier and the tenets of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in Latin America. Its construction, according to James Holston, was not pri - marily a symbol of an already achieved modernity; instead, the city and its construc - tion were to actively forge a new age. 52 As in Venezuela, modern architecture in Brazil took on the status of an agent of progress. There exists, however, no Venezuelan equivalent to Juan Domingo Perón’s working-class descamisados in Argentina, or to the candangos who descended upon central Brazil by the tens of thousands to build the city—new names imposed on new categories of workers who became significant agents (and symbols) of Argentine and Brazilian developmental - ism. Instead, the Venezuelan masses were cast as consumers and spectators, mute witnesses to the “magical” state’s transformation of oil into the spectacular environ - ment that was, in turn, to make them modern.

From Nature to Abstraction Of all the artist commissions from this time, Otero’s polychrome mural per - haps best captures the conflicted attitude toward the natural world that has defined so much twentieth-century Venezuelan art. The specificity, even the blinding excess, of tropical nature characterized Venezuela’s modernism perhaps more than that of any other Latin American country, yet the nation’s anxiety with regard to the potentially atavistic pull of that nature was particularly acute. Nature, understood as raw materiality, stood squarely at the center of the image of a nation in formation, yet in the minds of Venezuelans, it vacillated between rep -

50. Ibid., p. 167. 51. Ibid., 168. 52. See James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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resenting promise (of wealth) and threat (of backwardness). For Otero, and the generation of kinetic artists that would dominate Venezuelan art in the following decade, color’s ability to move between particular material instantiations and uni - versal aspirations became a way of bridging nature and history, the particular and the universal. 53 Otero had no political or personal sympathy with the dictatorial regime, although he shared with a wide cross section of the Venezuelan intelligentsia an interest in bringing Venezuela into the forward march of history and in remaking the national territory with the markers of a radically new reality to come (what Otero referred to in 1957 as “new signs capable of expressing the new and totaliz - ing order of reality”). 54 In the April 1950 issue of Los Disidentes , Otero called Venezuela a “young country.” 55 More than just a reference to the nation’s date of independence, his statement implies a belief that Venezuela was, with its new identity as an oil nation, just entering into the current of history. Ariel Jiménez argues that Otero perceived his country, and Latin America more generally, as a “space without time, nature without history, a mineral reality that lives behind, outside of time.” 56 It is only through insisting on the historical innocence of Venezuela that such a project of entering the country seamlessly into “universal time” could be accomplished. The polychrome’s reference to nature is rendered undeniable by the co-presence of the sky, yet that presence likewise makes evident the abstraction of color from nature. As sky becomes façade in the viewer’s field of vision, nature transforms into a vibrating spectacle of pure color. In his shift from landscape to abstraction (and therefore from local color to pure color), Otero does not erase locality, but rather converts it. Natural color is harnessed into Otero’s matrices of contemporaneity (the grid and industrial color), and history itself is grafted onto the young country. In 1955, the year before Otero completed the polychrome for the Faculty for Architecture, he began to paint again. In what would become the Coloritmo (Colorhythm) series, numbering seventy-five in total, Otero produced a sequence of highly polished, emphatically vertical paintings on wood or Plexiglas in which irregular colored shapes seem to float behind regular black-and-white striations. For the first time in these works, Otero employed Duco paint, the glossy industrial lacquer used since the 1920s on the surfaces of cars, toys, and consumer appli - ances. His earlier restrictions (local color, Picasso’s palette, primary colors, spec -

53. Pérez-Oramas argues that while Otero was not a kinetic artist, he served as the theoretical and aesthetic conscience of kineticism, setting the stage for the decade of art that would follow. Luis Pérez-Oramas, La resistencia de las sombras: Alejandro Otero y Gego , p. 45. 54. Alejandro Otero, “Polémica sobre arte abstracto,” in Fuentes documentales y críticas de las artes plásticas venezolanas: siglos XIX y XX , ed. Roldán Esteva-Grillet (Caracas, Venezuela: Universidad Central de Venezuela and Consejo de Desarrollo Científico y Humanístico, 2001), p. 365. Originally published in several installations in March and April 1957 in the newspaper El Nacional (Caracas). 55. Otero, “Las ‘Placas al Mérito’ y la juventud,” p. 65. 56. Ariel Jiménez, “Introducción,” He vivido por los ojos , p. 10.

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tral colors) gave way to the pleasures of the com - mercial color chart. In these works, lime green, teal, and brown intermingle with the primary colors. While Duco had a significant artistic history by 1955 (in the hands of artists no less significant than David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock), Otero claims that his introduction to the material was at a car-repair shop in Caracas, where he noticed the “pure and brilliant colors” of the sample charts dis - played for clients. 57 Whereas the adoption of indus - trial lacquers by the likes of Pollock was a democra - tizing gesture, a rejection of the preciousness and prohibitive costs of artists’ materials, for Otero it was at least a tacit embrace of oil’s conversion into the most advanced, imported consumer commodi - ties. The Coloritmos marked the beginning of Otero’s retreat from the façades of Villanueva’s architecture and the natural world in which they were in dialogue, but he still sought to re-create the pleasure and plenitude of those pulsating, envelop - ing spaces of color. His interest in optical vibration, and therefore color’s separation from any particu - lar material manifestation, made color the perfect vehicle through which to enact a slide from nature to commodity, from God’s land to man’s. The tran - sition from tropical skies and blinding equatorial light to the minty greens and shiny reds of DuPont’s commercial portfolio echoes not only the conver - sion of oil into commodity but also the effort to envelop the new Venezuelan subject in the trap - pings of actuality. The pleasure of color remains, and perhaps even the particular idea of light and color as central to Venezuelan national identity, but it is no longer beset with the threat of atavism. The strains of Latin American abstraction that aligned most closely with industrialization (for example, the artists grouped around the journal Nueva Visión in Buenos Aires and the Grupo Ruptura in São

Otero. Coloritmo I. 1955. 57. “Artist in Duco Honored in New York,” source © 2014 Artists Rights unknown, archival newspaper clipping, dated March 24, 1956. Society (ARS), New York. Archive CINAP-GAN, Caracas, Venezuela. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

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Paulo, both in the early 1950s) either eschewed color or treated it as mere decora - tion. In an effort to create forms appropriate for application in those countries’ nascent industries, artists focused on questions of pictorial structure, deriving form from mathematical permutations. Otero’s adoption of abstraction as an art of color in 1950s Venezuela seems fitting for a country deeply interested in com - modities as objects of desire but not of production. Otero’s goal in the 1950s was to achieve an art that might render Venezuela commensurate with the present; what he in fact produced with his polychrome façade for the Faculty of Architecture was an embodiment of the country’s partic - ular form of modernity at that moment. While it brought raw nature and the specificity of “Venezuelan light” in line with the rational matrix of the grid, its emphasis on color renders the viewer a disembodied witness to the surrounding transformation. Color disrupts the solidity of architectural form, but it likewise distances the viewer from the material spaces of that architecture, and therefore from the historically determined collectives that might form within them. During these early years as an oil nation, Venezuela’s modernity was primarily understood neither as a social project of the liberation of the individual nor as the collection of new habits and experiences that accompany industrialization and urbanization; rather, it was seen as a collection of goods and structures that were the output of those processes taking place elsewhere. The people, like the viewers of Otero’s polychrome, were cast not as agents of historical progress but as the recipients of its by-products. Like the Duco paint and new cars increasingly available to Venezuelans over the course of the 1950s, contemporaneity would remain some - thing to be imported from abroad and grafted onto a land in search of it.

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