ALIRIO ORAMAS, CHROMATIC SIMULTANEOUSNESS, 1953
Some of his works from the nineties – as beautiful as they are little discussed – show how his skillful hands transformed the most common metals in symbolic gold. There his great contribution to painted magical realism
By ALBERTO FERNÁNDEZ R.
The historian Tomás Straka assures that between the 1920s and the 1990s, in what—paraphrasing his British colleague Eric Hobsbawm—he calls the “century xx short” Venezuelan, there was an “explosion of creativity” that currently arouses growing interest among academics and specialists inside and outside the country (1). Furthermore, he explains that the international appreciation of the work, often exceptional, of the references of local artistic modernity is the most outstanding result of said rediscovery process. By this he refers to the important retrospective exhibitions that American institutions dedicated to Gego and Alfredo Boulton between 2023 and this year. It is inevitable that other reflections emerge from Straka’s timely reflections; It is the logical chain of knowledge. Thus, among these collateral considerations, it could be pointed out how researchers and art historians have a fertile field of work in Venezuela, both due to its richness and the incipient nature of its exploration; More creators are waiting for their intellectual legacy to be comprehensively reviewed. The case of Alirio Oramas (1924-2016) well exemplifies this. That “century xx short” is also the time frame in which this artist formulated his heterogeneous work, which constitutes a significant part of such an insufficiently narrated “explosion of creativity.”
The reconstruction of his professional career reveals his leading role in the development of the local scene. Next to Oswaldo Vigas, Mario Abreu, Régulo Pérez, Marius Sznajderman and Humberto Jaimes Sánchez, Oramas founded the decisive Taller Libre de Arte in 1948. It is impossible to address the Venezuelan artistic production of the “century xx short” without taking into account the work of this cultural association, which was fundamental in the process of filtering international artistic ideas into the Caracas environment. Oramas was active in the Workshop until he traveled to Europe to continue his training after winning the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1951. He initially settled in Paris and came into contact with abstraction. After returning to the country in 1956, he was invited by Carlos Raúl Villanueva to participate in his “Integration of the Arts” project in the University City of Caracas and made four abstract-geometric murals on the university campus. His renovating spirit, typically modern, made him abandon geometry towards the end of the decade and integrate new workshops and avant-garde movements in the following years. But unlike his generation colleagues, being a mature artist, Oramas was also interested in the proposals of those young people who sought their sources in New York and not in Paris. During the eighties, he carried out installations and a series of actions that brought him closer to conceptual proposals.
It is interesting that such an eclectic production does not lack a common thread. Félix Suazo rightly points out how the esoteric runs through Oramas’ work, from his paintings to his actions (2). It is not a minor fact. In Venezuela, in essence, postwar figuration was more social than fantastic; its model being the politically committed painting of Jacobo Borges. And this was so despite the fact that the country, with mythological beings such as María Lionza or José Gregorio Hernández, where Santería leaves scenes as surprising as those captured by the photographer Cristina García Rodero, could well have been inspiration for the magical realism written by Gabriel García Márquez and painted by Frida Kahlo, Wilfredo Lam, Alejandro Obregón or Fernando de Zsyszlo. Hence the urgency of reviewing the real-wonderful images of Oramas, which link him to one of the main Latin American artistic currents, the only one with which the region was identified outside its borders, before the timely review of modern geometries. South Americans.
Oramas was not alone. No artist, no matter how genius he may seem, has been. Olwaldo Vigas and Mario Abreu preceded him, and with more notable results then, in the formulation of an art linked to the mythical, the vernacular and the fantastic. This data is not minor either. Juan Carlos Palenzuela reviewed how the members of the Taller Libre de Arte, among whom were these three artists, had contact with Alejo Carpentier, one of the main authors of that written magical realism, who was exiled in Caracas between 1945 and 1959 (3) . Vigas painted his well-known witchesthose successful reinterpretations of the Coming from Tacariguaperhaps, the most beautiful ceramic piece among all the pre-Hispanic material culture found in Venezuela. While Abreu assembled his magic boxes, in which he turns trivial objects, through resignification processes to which he subjects them, into ritual objects.
Another interesting aspect of Oramas’s story is that, as he ages, his work becomes more ingenious. This situation was not common among his generation companions either, without being an exceptional event in the art world. In this sense, and always keeping proportions, her case could be compared to that of Claude Monet, Louise Bourgeois or Gego herself. In the nineties, Oramas published a series of works such as The philosopher’s gold (1995) y The golden ladle (1998), in which they are assumed as a kind of king Midas of the tropics. That is to say, in those pieces that are as beautiful as they are little discussed, he manipulates the more common metals that are transformed into (symbolic) gold, as enigmatic as that which underlies the myth of El Dorado and, even, as valuable as that which is sold by bullion. It is not a translation of images as in Vigas, nor the production of sacred amulets as in Abreu. Oramas’s capital contribution to painted, or sculpted, magical realism is his successful conception of art as alchemy.
References
2 Félix Suazo, “Alirio Oramas: between painting and the body”, in: Alirio Oramas: From mystery to revelationsExhibition Catalog, National Art Gallery, Caracas, 2006, p. 23
3 Juan Carlos Palenzuela, “Taller Libre de Arte”, in: ArtNexusNo. 28, April-June, 1998.
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