Until this Sunday, April 17, the exhibition “Grids 1993-2020”, by Venezuelan Sigfredo Chacón, is presented at the Henrique Faria New York gallery, consisting of a selection of works by this creator that defy the borders between painting and sculpture. : “Grids” (Grids), one of his most emblematic series (1993-2020), along with “sculptures” from the series “Horror Vacui (1994-2020)”, and related works on paper.
Currently residing in Miami, Sigfredo Chacón (Caracas, 1950), is a graduate of the Neuman Design Institute, one of the most demanding institutions in the training of designers in Caracas in the 1960s, from which he acquires tools to address the artistic fact regardless of fashions and trends.
“That experience was very important for my artistic activity, since it gives me endless resources and possibilities to develop this means of expression. For me the content of a work is as important as the way to make it visible. They are two inseparable things, “he says.
Throughout his career, the artist has had an interest in fundamental aspects of modern art, such as the grid and monochrome, and how these elements are revealed within painting and sculpture.
From the late 1960s and early 1970s, during his formative years at the Neumann Design Institute in Caracas, The Chelsea School of Art and Design, and The London College of Printing, his research flourished in a context in which the precepts Modernism were constantly being questioned and directed to the development of a postwar Venezuelan national identity, together with their mentors Gerd Leufert, Gego, Nedo and their generation companions, the artists Eugenio Espinoza, Roberto Obregón and Héctor Fuenmayor.
Referring to this reversal of roles between painting and sculpture, the art historian Jesús Fuenmayor writes:
“To this aspiration or desire of painting to go beyond itself (its constant need to transform itself), we must add, in order to understand the Chacón Grids in all their complexity, that the grid is one of the most reviewed resources in the non-compositional painting of the twentieth century because it symbolizes the collapse of the image and the field (or of the figure and the background, if you prefer the terminology of representative painting) and implies a deductive structure (each unit is deduced from the previous one) “.- –
