ALQUIMIA: HECHX EN VENEZUELA
In Dialogue with: Emilia Azcárate, Carlos Castillo, Milton Becerra, Claudio Perna,
Alexander Apóstol, Margot Römer, Pedro Centeno Vallenilla y Francisco Narváez.
Carolina Vollmer
April 4th to May 16th, 2024
META Miami and Henrique Faria New York are pleased to present Carolina Vollmer ALQUIMIA: Hechx en Venezuela.
In Dialogue with: Emilia Azcárate, Carlos Castillo, Milton Becerra, Claudio Perna, Alexander Apóstol, Margot Römer, Pedro Centeno Vallenilla y Francisco Narváez.
“The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes, placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both, and create a third thing.”
Jerry Saltz.
According to the Royal Spanish Academy dictionary, alchemy is a “set of speculations and experiences, generally of an esoteric nature related to the transmutations of matter, which influenced the origin of chemistry. Wonderful and incredible transmutation.”
As a philosophical discipline that preceded the sciences, alchemy originated over 2,500 years ago in China and Egypt. In their laboratories, alchemists pursued the dream of finding the essence of matter. They thought that by discovering its soul and intervening in it, they would achieve its transmutation.
Herein lies this proposal: a sort of alchemy of wills, an experiment. Matter atomized into many parts that would then form a whole, different from each one of the separate parts. The result: an enigma. Would we manage to find the soul of the project? What if, here and now, we could transform lead into gold?
Alquimia is a collaborative work in which women and men of diverse backgrounds were gathered to shape a part of the Venezuelan territory using embroidery as the primary means in a completely free way. Every fragment of these maps was executed without the author knowing who their neighbors would be in this collective work. Consequently, each one of these fragments was interpreted in a personal and unprejudiced way, with each artist’s individual idea of what that geographical space meant. Thus recreating many natural characteristics and cultural elements by simply expressing themselves in their own particular language.
Artists who have remained in Venezuela, others who have emigrated, people close to the artist herself and women from organized low-income communities voluntarily joined the project with no expectation of retribution or recognition. Their only intention was to support a common endeavor.
Given the extent of offers of anonymous participation, Carolina Vollmer has produced a metaphor that allows us to imagine the real possibility of fulfilling an urgent aspiration: the reunification of the country.
About CAROLINA VOLLMER:
Born and lives in Caracas, Venezuela. Lawyer and Master in
Organizational Development graduated from the Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas, her artistic training takes place outside the academy, with the help of important Venezuelan artists with whom she learns the techniques of collage, charcoal, painting, screen printing, and engraving.
Carolina Vollmer is a well-rounded artist who uses languages as dissimilar as painting, assemblage, installation, or video. In recent years, she has developed a series of objectual works and actions focused on highlighting the circumstances that transform the national reality. A critical look that would gather and invent the fragments left by the political happenings of the nation. And that, more recently, strives to assemble and rebuild by combining the multiplicity that constitutes us.
Vollmer prioritizes the concepts and ideas she wishes to communicate and then chooses the most suitable mediums to carry them out. The need to capture an image of the quotidian emergency is sifted through the reflexive time necessary to find the appropriate materials and techniques, building pieces that are far from mere political pamphlets or denunciations.
These plastic exercises point at a solution to the conflict, from the reestablishment of essential ties to the cohabitation and reconstruction of citizenship. Because of this, since mid-2020, the artist has conceived projects in which others must participate, more or less directly, to achieve the piece’s realization.
This occurs in Alquimia, a collaborative work in which women and men of diverse backgrounds were gathered to shape a part of the Venezuelan territory, using embroidery as the primary means in a completely free way. Every fragment of these thirteen maps was taken up without the author/s knowing who their neighbors would be in this collective piece.
Consequently, each of them interpreted their own idea of what that geographical space means in a personal and unprejudiced way. They can recreate some characteristic natural or cultural element or express themselves in their own language.
Artists who remain in Venezuela and many others who have emigrated, people close to the artist herself, and women from organized low-income communities voluntarily joined the project with no expectation of retribution or recognition. Only with the intention of supporting a common endeavor. With the amount of anonymous participation offered, Vollmer has produced a metaphor that allows us to imagine the real possibility of fulfilling an urgent aspiration: The reunification of the country.
Each map is a simile of recovering the symbolic space that unites us. Each stitch on the fabric, a step towards repairing the contour of who we are and what shapes us as a society.
Through this exercise of time, where the waiting for others is essential, and embroidery is expressed as a donation of life and the restoration of empathy, Vollmer invites us to thread collectively, remake the seams, and mend the deep fissures caused by the ideological confrontation of the last decades.
Richard Aranguren
About MARGOT RÖMER
Margot Römer (1938–2005) was a Venezuelan artist, who was a leader of radical experimental art, a teacher and a professional pilot. Her artwork reflected topics involving domesticity and sensuality of the human body. She emphasized topics of the female body by using objects to create irony. Römer had diverse knowledge in many mediums including silkscreen, pencil, oil painting, and sometimes assemblages or collages involving found objects.
Although she chose not to define herself as a political artist, after the late 1970s Römer developed works incorporating the motif of the Venezuelan flag to make critical comments about violence and corruption.
Toward the end of her life her work became increasingly abstract. In 2000 she won the Premio Nacional Armando Reverón for visual arts and obtained a degree in education from the Universidad Nacional Experimental Simón Rodríguez and studied theology as a postgraduate student at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, both in Caracas.
Margot Römer died in Caracas in 2005.
About EMILIA AZCÁRATE
Born in Caracas in 1964. Lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
As an artist and researcher, Emilia Azcárate explores various aspects of the individual and society as a starting point for her abstract work. Conceptually, it is nourished not only by the personal and spiritual but also by the historical, social, and political.
About ALEXANDER APÓSTOL
Alexander Apóstol was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in 1969. He studied photography with Ricardo Armas from 1987 to 1988, and art history at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, from 1987 to 1990.
Alexander Apóstol’s work explores connections between art, political texts, and socio-political events within the history of art and architecture. He focuses on Latin American politics and culture. Working across photography and video, Apóstol’s work examines the link between architecture and urban planning with the history of South America. Since early in his career, he has concentrated on the iconography of the urban landscape. His work comprises photographs, films, installations, and texts.
Alexander Apóstol lives and works between Madrid and Caracas, Venezuela.
About PEDRO CENTENO VALLENILLA
Born in Barcelona, the capital of Anzoategui State in Venzuela, on June 13, 1904.
Pedro Centeno Vallenilla entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Caracas in 1915, where he studied with Almeida Crespo and Alvarez Garcia. He then studied law at the Central University of Venezuela, received his doctorate degree there in 1926, and after graduation he entered the diplomatic service. In 1927 he traveled to Europe, serving in Paris until 1932. From 1932 he was the Venezuelan representative at the Vatican in Rome. Influenced by native Venezuelan lore, Renaissance masters, and Italian Fascists, Vallenilla's artwork glorifies the male body. From 1940 to 1944 he lived in the United States, where he did panels and murals at the Embassy of Venezuela in Washington. When he returned to Caracas, he devoted his life entirely to painting, and he opened a school in his workshop.
He died in Caracas on August 14, 1988
About FRANCISCO NARVÁEZ
Francisco Narváez was a Venezuelan sculptor and painter born in 1905 in Porlamar.
Considered a pre-eminent Modernist in Venezuela, Francisco Narváez, began his artistic trajectory in the 1930s with works that exult the truly native and ethnic in Venezuelan culture. His work is characterized by a strong ethnic component and he made extensive use of local materials.
From his beginnings, no subject was foreign to him. His paintings, drawings, aquarelles, and sketches are testimony to his prolific output. Among his themes are portraits, Venezuelan traditions, still lifes, and landscapes. His subjects include a new social realism, religious and domestic scenes, and historical events.
Narváez is an artist who represents his time. He claims to have attained the union between painting and sculpture – The dimension that painting lacked, through stuccoes. Later, he evolved towards purer and simpler forms, abandoning figurative art for short periods.
Francisco Narvaez deceased on July 7, 1982
About CLAUDIO PERNA
Geographer, archivist, explorer, and traveler: these are some of the terms one could use to describe Claudio Perna.
Perna was born to a Venezuelan mother and an Italian father, and was raised by his father’s family near Milan. In 1955, at the age of 16, he moved to Caracas, and in 1963 began undergraduate studies in geography at Universidad Central de Venezuela, where he ultimately became a professor. His academic research and artistic practice developed into an investigation on Venezuela. He traveled around the country and visited communities that were at risk of disappearing due to urban development.
Perna devoted himself to teaching, ecology, and art, touching on aspects connected to the individual, the environment, and society. From his first artistic attempts in the mid-1960s, Perna moved rapidly from one medium to another, from photography to video, from drawing to collage, from objects to performance. Yet, there was always a fixed objective in these explorations: the subject and its surroundings both urban and natural, motifs that persisted throughout his career.
He died in Holguín, Cuba, in 1997.
About MILTON BECERRA
Milton Becerra is a Venezuelan artist, born in 1951.
He graduated from the Cristobal Rojas School in 1972. Between 1974 and 1980 Becerra worked in the studios of Jesus Soto and Cruz-Diez, pioneering Modernists who shared a pre-occupation with the urban landscape. Becerra’s growing awareness of the destruction of Venezuela’s traditional cultures and natural habitat led him to seek a plastic language that might acknowledge his social and environmental concerns. Beginning in the 1980’s Becerra spent time with Amazonian tribes, learning their cosmology, their ways of interacting with the world, and their techniques of weaving organic materials.
For the last 39 years, the artist has lived and worked in Paris, producing a wide variety of works, in which he combines a wide range of materials, including semi-precious stones, quartz, fragments of pre-Columbian ceramics, natural and nylon fibers, wood , copper, metal, and with less conventional media such as water, light and sound.
About LEO MATIZ
Leo Matiz (Aracataca, Colombia 1917 – Bogotá, Colombia 1998) is deemed by critics to be one of the great photographers of the 20th century. Restless by nature and a globetrotter extraordinaire, Matiz incessantly photographed all the Americas from North to South. He was also a photographer reporter and is the author of a series of portraits which comprise a mosaic that may be identified with all Latin America.
Matiz also documented Venezuela’s transition to democracy under President Rómulo Betancourt and photographed the dizzying growth of Caracas—partly thanks to rising oil revenue and Venezuela’s participation in the new Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. He photographed the Universidad Central de Venezuela, a masterpiece of contemporary Venezuelan architecture in every detail and the result is a set of precise and aseptic views which represent one of the most lucid moments of architectural photography in the 20th century.