Rubén Osorio Canales

I sit in the hall of Medicci Gallery to see this new exhibition of Asdrubal Colmenárez and I am nothing but moved. Memory intermittently sends me the log of previous works. My sensibility is pleased with what that exhibit which he called Mare Nostrum, left me, and without any transition, as if an inner vision shook me, it appeared before me one of his paintings of the 90’s, "The Immediate”, a powerful canvas with numbered edges, measuring tapes and an interior, rather than split, open and bare for the eye to poke through it, discovers and tries to build a world, a whole story. If a painter in these aspects of contemporary art invites you to participate in the work, to come into the cracks, to take possession of his corners and read his codes, that is Asdrúbal Colmenárez.

I stay a while playing with his numbers, his letters and those planes full of accurate colors, and everything leads me to the canvases of "Nomad Latency" , with its unique codes emphasizing the conceptualization that, along with the playful and the constant displacement of the nomad constitute the fundamental commandments of his painting. And I ride the memory through that "Voyage" with its lively compasses and successes and I repeat that all this was the necessary platform for Asdrubal, Colmenárez to undertake this new, long, endless journey along a path as old as man.

It could not be otherwise, his compasses were tuned and adjusted as had been his maps and his codes, all these verifications made with the eye of a nomadic poet, the only thing to be done was to begin the long journey making precise turns, weaving by pulse, but with wise urgency, a gigantic stage, long and deep, where walking the long distances of the journey, struck at the same time, by a desire not to arrive so soon or simply not to arrive, that is, in essence, the true significance and rationale of all nomad beings.

Thus, with a suitcase full of magic paraphernalia and a memory rich and dense, Asdrúbal Colmenares began his very personal journey to Ithaca, decided to enter into the eternal soul of Homer, touring every inch of the disturbing story of each character and bring them to our eyes filled with contemporary. Sensual Figures, tangible, standing, or curled up, and woven, drawn, or just incorporated, always as if waiting for the best opportunity to tell us things, to give us a sign and incorporate us to its mission and spirit. It's amazing and I would say magical, the way in which Colmenárez, shuffles his entire arsenal of codes, modes and signs and weaves them into this journey that he performs with strength, clarity and accuracy, juxtaposing characters, lines, numbers, color, material, characters, resulting in an explosion of feelings, of souls that dance in his space, which from their poses and clothes sometimes unusual, demanding our attention, probably to let us see, letter by letter, their poignant stories. Certainly we enter into the history of the characters, (Colmenárez makes this an absolutely unavoidable fact) with them and their pace we move through a denseness that is not unknown to us. Paris, Helen, Ulysses, Circe, Penelope, Telemachus are our peers. With them we go and with them we sing. With Ulysses we stretch the bow and shoot down the suitors of our possessions, with Telemachus we grow and stop being children.

In each painting, and I would say that in all the work of this great artist appears his playfulness, his inexhaustible spirit and his faith in art, the discoveries and freedom. He could find no better theme to walk on the path already walked on, and take off into other dimensions and new areas. In each work there is a new inquiry, new elements, materials worked with his hands and incorporated here and there, so that those who enter into his trip do not get lost easily. It is clear that an artist eminently playful as this one can put in either corner, a sign to make us get lost in the maze, immediately helping us with very precise coordinates that will magically take us to the heart of the matter. The great thing about this is that, guided by his formidable instinct and by his mastery of his performances, he makes us enter and search in every corner of his long History, indeed, he makes us enter into the spirit of the deities, in all supernatural, in landscapes and storms, in spells and the abduction of war, in the bones and the soul of each character, and of course, in the soul of Homer himself. Whatever happens in the essence of every character, every situation is reflected in this work and everything that happens in the life and soul of the hero is embodied in the work. But the quest does not stopped in Ulysses; there are also Paris, Helena, the Cyclops, Circe, and we all. And in that being, we are overwhelmed by the metaphor that Colmenárez wisely hangs on our consciences, to indicate the futility of war and the need to meet and talk in a long dialogue in which each one of us exercises the totally free freedom, non-transferable, non-restrictive.

The greatest asset of man is freedom and that is precisely the theme of this awesome exhibit and the entire artist's work, a joyous freedom, and yet full of strength and of great judgments, where there is no fear to anything or anyone. This is certainly a beautiful Homeric reading by Asdrubal Colmenárez, with a touchingly personal calligraphy.

Seeing this magnificent exhibition, there fell into my memory, slowly, a beautiful poem by Cavafy titled Ithaca, and I remembered how that reading changed my way of seeing the Odyssey, reading Homer, exercising rebellion and also my way of beginning each trip. I have had very similar feelings seeing these paintings of the ODYSSEY by Asdrubal Colmenárez:

"When you undertake the journey to Ithaca / pray that the road is long. / That there are many summer mornings / where, with pleasure, with joy, / you come into harbors never seen before ... Go so you learn from scholars. Arriving to Ithaca is your destination but do not hurry the journey... It's better that it lasts many years / and that old, you get to the island, / rich of everything you've gained on the way."

With contemporary gaze, supported by the vast resources of his constant and diligent personal research, that is the vision that gives us this great artist. He illustrates it with characters of today full of charm and mystery, knowing that deep down these of today, that are all of us in our each day journeys, we no longer count on "with the participation of the gods", to use a happy expression of our always alive Salvador Garmendia...

This personal Odyssey that Asdrúbal Colmenares began, not completed yet, as the exemplary nomad he is, he knows that the only thing he can get from Ithaca, as Cavafy says, is the journey. Surely, we will get together at next station

Rubén Osorio Canales

Venezuelan (1934), Writer and poet with seven books published, also a man of radio, film and television, he was General Director of the National Institute of Culture (INCIBA), Director of Radio Nacional, Vice President of Monte Avila Publishing House, Director of Televisora Nacional, President of Venezolana de Television. For the past five years has written column in the weekly La Razón, which under the title "The Sunday dish," he walks through gastronomy and some stories of citizens. Forthcoming books of poetry, State of Siege and My Friend, My Brother and a collection of reviews under the title The Shared Table, the second volume of his memoirs of The Firebox.

Interviewed by Jose Pulido

Asdrubal Colmenárez seems like a woodcutter who wanders in the forest removing the shell of a tree or calculating the age of a eucalyptus. He actually distances himself a little, conceals some shyness and tries to hide in his paintings. He gets agitated submerged behind the scenes, he observes his paintings very closely, scrutinizes details, sees the frames in case one is broken. He does not like to talk directly with someone: he prefers to do it while executing his endless game of cutting off his navel and disconnecting from his works. It seems he never wants to finish them: if he would not stop for a reason known only by his muses, he would continue painting the same picture forever.

His paintings are like sentimental maps, destined to place the passions of those who see them. His sculptures always inspire awe and end filling the eyes with the same effect as the smells of the past trigger in memory. A sculpture made by him lying on a beach or on a street, can extract all the memories of the past that the individual or group have of the times when magic was commonplace.

Although he frequently refers to antiquity and the most remote emotional times of man, the art of Asdrubal Colmenárez is fresh and young, it is a daring act, a rebellious gesture, an irreverent communication. Perhaps this is because Colmenárez is an artist who does not age. It's like all the time would fly to the origin of things, to genesis and authenticity. Towards the rising sun.

Personally, he is a strong man, brave, that does not seem to relax for a second. His place is his workshop. There he unfolds in his environment. His fertility generates expressions, he makes a work grow. For several years he has been touching the theme of eroticism from deep angles and very poetic, as when he offered the public his vision of Odysseus and Homer.

Colmenárez always addresses a theme and develops it until he reaches its shores. His works are not chaotic or capricious. It's like he would be writing a book and he will display it on various canvases or in a group of sculptures. He maintains cohesion, never loses the thread and expressiveness. This year he directly addresses the theme of eroticism. The first question makes him raise his head and stops wandering between racks.

-The theme of eroticism, did it appear suddenly or were you already considering it as a possibility?
In Odyssey, the previous exhibit, one can see many characters that reflect eroticism. Eroticism is inherent to man; you cannot separate man from eroticism or the cultural. In all civilizations eroticism is very important.

Colmenárez shows this time his vision of the female body and he does so as under the guidance of the poetic. It is normal that his experiences and the wealth of his habitual readings help him in the workshop: it is well known that he read Homer and the rapporteurs of tragedies such as Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Speaking of eroticism he quotes Georges Bataille among others.

Bataille, incidentally, wrote: "A man, a woman, is generally regarded as beautiful as long as their shapes move away from animalism ...."

- Have you found the right woman?
"I think that all men carry in the subconscious, in dreams, in the mind, an image of a woman who can never be found, a fictitious image, utopian, that one makes of a woman ...it is a kind of an ideal. It is an ideal that does not exist ...

- What influences have you invoked for this exhibit?
"My influence as a sculptor is the prisoners that Michelangelo made for the Medici tomb ... you cannot escape the classics ... my readings are the same as you have had or that anyone has had: Artaud, Bataille, Lautremont ... what interests me of the classics is that their eroticism was kind of subversive, although I think that the church ruined it ...

- Why do you think so?
"Because it's something fabulous when you make love for pleasure, but when you have an obligation to multiply yourself, the thing is not so good ... you cannot separate the human being of eroticism ... in 1968 I had the opportunity to go to Pompeii ... I visited the brothel of the city ... there were stone beds and behind the beds there were frescoes depicting various sexual positions that people thought were invented, in addition to the Kama Sutra ... and it appears that such things already existed ... the Vesuvius swept the city in the year 79 BC, but could not destroy the erotic frescoes of that brothel... the sexual act had been painted there, using a special red color, which is red of Pompeii ... the eroticism is not new: it is never new ...

-But it is the transgressor, isn’t it?
"It is always a transgressor because it is something that liberates ... I think those guys are very aggressive, they probable do not make love often. Because after you make love you are quiet ... engrossed ... as in paradise ...

-Inevitably, when it comes to eroticism, the subject of pornography appears ...
"For me it's more pornographic to read in the newspaper that there were seventy deaths in one weekend ... making pornography is easy ... hard is to suggest things that motivate eroticism without falling into the common and obscene image...

Asdrubal Colmenárez displays in Caracas this exhibition that is perceived truly shocking: it's like a painted whirlwind.

The eroticism is relevant
Indeed; it is worth noting that currently, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, there is an unusual and successful exhibition of the image of San Sebastian. The pain and ecstasy attracts and moves the audience from five pieces painted by the same author: the Italian Guido Reni (1575-1642). This exhibition was organized in 2007 by Musei di Strada Nuova in Genoa with pieces loaned by the Museum of Prado (Madrid), Museum of Art of Ponce (Puerto Rico) Photographic Archive Capitolina Art Gallery of Rome and the Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand. It is the first time that the five pieces come together. The one that is in the Louvre lacked, but it is very fragile and cannot travel.

This exhibition, which theme is San Sebastian, is impressive and overwhelming. The saint, so often painted by Guido Reni, became an erotic symbol, precisely because it involves nudity, pain and ecstasy in one jerk. The eroticism is very tricky: for every human being the connection is different. The Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, discovered his homosexuality when he was fourteen years old, watching an image of San Sebastian and then expressed it in the novel Confessions of a Mask.

"From the day I became obsessed with the painting of St. Sebastian, I had the habit of unconsciously crossing my hands over the head whenever I was naked. My bodies were fragile, and not even a pale shadow of the abundant beauty of the saint’s body. But once again I spontaneously adopted that position. In doing so, I looked at my armpits. And a mysterious sexual desire arose within me.... "

Misaim also wrote: "In the xylographs of the Genroku period, one can often see that the features of two lovers are strikingly similar, to the point that it is difficult to distinguish male and female. Similarly, the ideal of beauty of the Greek sculpture leads to the striking resemblance between male and female. Can one of the secrets of love be found here? "Is there the possibility that in the innermost recesses of love encourage a desire whereby both men and women are eager to become exactly like the other?”

Talking with the master
Talking about eroticism, we bring up these details to the Trujillo painter, who has delved into this matter, but he has also touched on the love theme from the point of view of the courteous tragedy and thoroughly knows what Plato elucidated in Phaedrus and in the Banquet. That is Platonism, "a fit, an undefined abduction of the reason and the natural sense ... deification."

Colmenárez likes these conversations because it is a voracious reader. It's hard to surprise him with an author. He could spend hours talking about literature, poetry. If someone touches on the subject of painting or sculpture, he becomes introverted and starts again to rummage through his canvases, to escape into the trades of the workshop.

-You continue to refine your language in painting with transparencies, references to different eras, the stories ...
"Yes, I do as a cook ... every day I add ingredients apart from the symbols I've used for some time ... the letters, numbers ... now I incorporated a sort of woven thing so what is behind cannot be seen ...

-You seem to renew your energies every time you present your paintings and sculptures to the public ...
"I came to the conclusion that art is the only free territory we still have in the world... if we have to spend all the energies of life to do so, you sacrifice yourself and spend those energies ... if we do not sacrifice ourselves what do we have left? nothing, because everything else are commitments ... you do art whenever and however you want ...

- Don’t you fear that there might be a negative reaction to your exhibits on eroticism? You know that the double standard is a permanent ambush ...
"To answer that you must go to Freud ... the truth is that the Oedipal relationship is very strong in Latin America ... the influence of the mother figure in a man makes sex always a taboo ... I studied for a PhD where we talked about Casanova and it was said that the womanizer has a very pronounced homosexual side ... Picasso remarked that we all have our feminine side within and it should like that ... people who fear going to one extreme is the people that manifest that double moral ...

-In Asia, particularly in Korea, has permeated your work, according to what we have read ...
"In the East they like more the sculpture than I make because it is totally opposite to painting ... my painting is kind of more violent ... my sculpture is more peaceful ... it is a field of meditation, reflection ... I have sculptures in Seoul (Korea), in Japan, Colombia and Venezuela ... the one in Colombia is in the Metro ...

-Excuse the comment, but you are more excited when talking about the sculpture ...
"I'll tell you one truth: my love is sculpture, but painting sculpture allows me to make sculptures ... because the sculpture is very difficult to place ... no one has the space and the sculpture that I like is definitely big... and who's going to get into his home? In the contemporary building spaces are reducing ...

- What renews you?
"Everybody says that I do not paint as a 70 year old ... and I think that is due to effects of love. But one must make a difference between love and sex. Sex alone just does not work ... well, it is also true that platonic does not exist ...

- And then? "Platonic love is not the search of the ideal woman?
"The ideal is not an accurate form ... it is as many forms ... the ideal is like searching for yourself ... finally, the artists that give life to things do not exist and that's a privilege ... nowadays, the painting is not something that screams look at me ... it is not a landscape to contemplate ... it has become quite the opposite: the painting is what looks at you, which interrogates and questions you,... before you looked at the painting ... now the painting looks at you ... that is one of the most important changes in contemporary art ...

Caracas, Venezuela
April 2008

Eduardo Planchart L

Asdrubal Colmenarez transmits Nomad Latency Series highly pictorial dynamism by his gestures, echoes of the conceptual elements incorporated in this series: sea, islands, deconstructed geographies in imaginary spaces, magazine pictures, naturalistic drawings plants, comics, A sense of playfulness is evident in the structural elements of the composition: the lines of light at ninety degrees angles or in the straight line that resonate with the viewfinder, cut colored paper printed with images of penguins on them, and postage stamps direct the viewer’s attention to different perceptual levels. The gestural contrasts with the utopian coordinate frame creating a visual tension between chaos and order, which refers to the planet perceived as totally threatened. This problematic is present in the art elements introduced as images of animals, naturalistic drawings of flowers and animals conceptually emblematic.

The postage stamp with its characteristic circumference is mutated in the visual center of the work, being also a way to emphasize the notion of nomadism that characterizes our civilization and which this series echoes. We do not only exist in a perennial toccata and fugue, but also the objects that surround us have a long traveling history. Thus, the forks we use to eat can be Chinese, the dishes English, the clothing Korean… Among these pilgrim universes takes place our everyday world; nevertheless, they do not have the trace that identifies them as belonging to a cultural and natural space, so we create an imagery collage that associates each of these elements to their productive geography.

Despite living in a global village in a mental universe that prevents us from identifying ourselves with the planet, as a living being composed of millions of strings of life of which humanity is only one, and in turn our planetary system is less than a speck of dust in our galaxy. The fact is known, but in practice our civilization ignores it. Instead we remain caught by a geocentric view, born of Ptolemy, where the planet and humanity is the center of the universe, hence the emphasis on minimizing in these paintings the human presence by accentuating and the marine life and the wildlife. Thus the sense of collage and its enveloping force in this series, manifested in the visual centers transformed into art whirlwinds that seem to absorb and merge all conceptual and aesthetic content, establishing the idea of interconnectedness that characterizes the various forms of life on Earth.

In our global village, a new kind of nomadism has emerged, in part detached from the traditional societies and related to the expansion in time and space that allows the post-industrial society. We do not only refer to the physical mobility of the human being, but to the cultural transhumance where everything seems to belong to everyone. Visual culture through the electronic media has created new cultural categories: instead communication and simultaneous, generates a new culture and a new way of knowing, to the extreme of creating an aesthetic and an ideology, constantly recreated from the visual fragments of all cultures that we face. This is another sense of the collage in the proposal of Asdrubal Colmenarez, hence between ethnographic maps and marine charts, he introduces natural elements such as leaves, thus facing us the paradoxical view that the means generate by making us confuse reality as a truth with the reality born from the electronic media that is an illusion.

In these works the natural elements accentuate the abyss between our planetary reality and the Image that we have drawn of it, creating in our inner universe an imaginary puzzle. Hence Asdrubal introduces in this series, blank puzzle pieces, to try to make us aware of the fragmentation and division that characterizes us. The rhythm and variety that assume the typographies stand out, they have their roots in the use made of them by both Russian Constructivism and Futurism which are combined with images of cartoons that add to some paintings as traces of our daily lives and how we are lived by the archetypes that electronic media create, images that are directly linked to by art and art as a way to get closer to our daily life archeology.

This migration has turned modern man’s existence into a wandering between concrete jungles and imaginary spaces, whose boundaries are no longer a region or a landscape but the full extent of our planet, as boundaries have become smaller we have embarked on a contradictory conquest of the universe.

These conceptual contents are constant, from the nineties, in the work of Asdrbual Colmenarez, who inspires his artistic language in ships, boats, spaceships, UFO’s, non existing geographies coordinates. In aesthetic terms, this contemporary nomadism is based on art categories characteristic of modernism.

This establishes a continuous recycling of what has been done in different cultural contexts to give a false sense of newness and renewal. However, these proposals draw on the cultural and spiritual roots of humanity, present in paradigmatic artists of our modernity and contemporary such as figures of abstract expressionism as Jackson Pollock, in the relationship that he establishes between his art and shamanism’s sands drawings of North American Indians, in Mark Rothko and the link of his monochromes with the non figurative conception of divinity in the Hebrew culture, in Frank Stella who inspires his monochromes and geometry in African shields. This fact is also present in the anthropometry of Ives Klein, who has much to do with the archaic body designs.

In the contemporary stand out Joseph Beuys and his link with the shamanic nomadism. Anselm Kifer due to his fixation on universal myths from Babylon through Mesoamerica to contemporary. This is evidence that cultural barriers have been broken and art has responded to this universality, instead of creating a uniform aesthetic is giving birth to a hybrid variety which echoes Nomad Latency series.

Elements such as handmade papers together with vegetable objects and consumerism waste get closer the proposal to the principles of Povera Art. We are before an approach to conceptual art has been a constant in the work of Asdrubal Colmenarez. The exhibition as a whole is a big puzzle, in the sense that each work is linked to the other and in turn each has multiple aesthetic and ideational echoes. The artist seems to mock the postmodernism with this attitude, because through his series takes us closer to the idea that has not yet created a split that has generated a new paradigm in art that transcends the limits of modernism, even when we are in the new millennium. Sets of ideas that are present in the painting that are playfully chained various 2000. The rupture posed by postmodernism sank in its own soil, hence the meaning of the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas Sofia Imber 1998.

The existential pilgrimage in the work of Asdrubal Colmenarez is a projection of features of his inner dimension that is embodied in his work. They are sometimes linked to his origins (Colmenarez was born in Trujillo in 1936), and his first art proposal is linked to Surrealism, technically inspired by his family roots, his father was a carpenter, becoming this period a journey into the unconscious. His first creative works have the trace of a nomadic interior.

Arriving in Paris in the late sixties, he begins his enquiry with the magnetic movement and the search for a relationship with the public desacralices the work and brings him closer to life, achieving his own ontological status, generating a revelation of the viewer’s creative qualities coming into contact with the aesthetic dimension, creating a tension between conceptual and constructivist features.

The psychomagnetics are thin metal strips on wood surfaces, which when touched generate a wave motion, which creates new ways by joining this action to lines he painted on the surfaces. With this work he began to attract the attention of the French critic and researcher Frank Popper, whom he specially mentions in his book “Art, Action and Participation”, 1980. One can link this stage of his speech to the Brazilian Lygia Clark in the series Trepantes, made in metal and wood in the late fifties. In a few years the artist goes from professor at the School of Fine Arts of Trujillo to experimental art professor at Paris VIII. This shows that if anything characterizes the life of the artist is nomadism, as his work has developed between Europe and the tropics. In the early nineties several key paintings that show this feature that has characterized the life of Asdrubal Colmenarez, which is present in the Series Mare Nostrum presented at the MACCSI in 1993. Where some pieces are autobiographical snippets of his wanderings through time and space over his lives, as it is evident in painting Mare Nostrum Series of 1992, where between imaginary coordinates the dots connect in time and the space of existential significance for the artist, creating a diagram of his future.

The atmosphere permeates the Mare Nostrum exhibition through conceptual and visual elemental that he introduces as maps, marine charts, compasses conveying the notion of imaginary trip that should move the viewer to geographies existing only in the inner reality, sense that becomes one of the axes of the series Nomad Latency. The idea is also reflected in his exhibition at the Alejandro Otero Museum, 1996, by introducing the subject of paper airplanes, childish, made of steel, mocking the industrial resonances of the material in both form and color, giving the idea of imaginary nomadism. Sense that focuses on the current series made between 1998 and 1999, since they are visions that seem to be born of a movie camera lens, which embodies this aesthetic Latency that were present in his artistic language due to historical and cultural rupture that the new millennium should bring. However, the French-Trujillo artist reminds us that it is necessary to refocus our attention on the planet that sustains us, since art goes beyond aesthetics. Thus this proposal mutates the aesthetics into an ethic reply by pushing us to think on the rupture point that is the end of the millennium. These conceptual contents are embodied in these pictorial collages in the presence of penguins printed on pieces of cut paper, naturalistic drawings on scrap paper that convey the notion of fragility in which these strings of life are, of which we are responsible, but it also draws our attention on the need to turn our attention to our origins as species, since much of the understanding of our contemporary history is hidden in the archetype of the Nomad Latency of our unconscious, hence some paintings provide photocopies of ethnographic maps of Africa and Brazil, as contemporary nomadism has its roots in the nomad culture, making it an inherent feature of our humanity that has just taken on new masks.

Caracas, June 1999

Katherine Chacón

Observing the work of Asdrubal Colmenárez that make up this exhibition, we might well be tempted to appreciate the almost hyper-realistic quality of his bill, or by "pop" bias of the formal resolutions or subjects discussed. However, it is interesting and necessary to get into what has been the poetic art of Asdrúbal Colmenárez to understand and enjoy the semantic density of his proposals.

Colmenárez's work is undoubtedly a work of research, this is a proposal based on the investigation of the elements of the aesthetic message. I'm talking about the message, because his research is not formal- it does not involve the formal aspect as the preeminent aspect-, but is mainly addressed to the semantic content of the artistic language and the way they are, in the contemporary world, permeated by countless influences that include concepts-and new concepts-on art.

Another feature of Colmenárez’s work is simultaneity, perhaps derived from his early approaches to surrealism. Through the simultaneity Colmenárez breaks through the linear discourse, merely representative to provide us access to multiple perceptual level, where different ideas come together making the work a mobile entity. No wonder many of his aesthetic aphorisms revolve around the idea of movement, the fleeting and the ephemeral as conditions of a true art of the future.
Colmenárez’s concern is also ethical, given that art is, for him, an important space for reflection, one that goes beyond the anecdotal, the merely formal or indoctrinating.

The works we see today gathered in this exhibition show an aspect that is very important in the artist's career: the transposition of the conceptual elements typical of the poetics of this Venezuelan creator in language- somewhat discredited by the modernity -of figurative painting. For this Asdrúbal Colmenárez uses a technical skill that surely he himself despises.

But make no mistake: Colmenárez’s intention is not gloating in the formal product of the work. The artist works the hyper figure as a decoy that allows us to get into other dimensions of speech only representative in appearance. The artist introduces simultaneity-and distancing- from the "hyper charm" through eminently "plastic" resources as drippings, planes and lines of pure color, color guides, texts, letters, subdivision of the space into grids, real objects hanging before the painting or glued on its surface and representations of these objects that subvert the hyper spatial coherence l. The painting then takes a spatial dynamics that, in some of the pieces presented, makes us remember certain embodiments of the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century.

The love for the machine was, indeed, an important aspect of the futuristic aesthetic, interested in echoing the industrial dynamism of the emerging modern world. From the machines, the car took a relevant place among the representations of this movement as a symbol of speed and changes in the perceptions of space-time that brought with it modernity.

Automobiles, engines, wheels, headlights and automotive segments are recurring representations in the works that make up this exhibition. But here cars are not used for the beauty of their design nor refer to the efficiency of their performance. They are destroyed and abandoned cars, whose remains lie stacked, incoherently, in a junkyard - and what a more desolate, and inconsistent place, than the "graveyard of the machine," where the opposites speed / quietness; progress / backwardness; life / death, come together in a kind of absurd promiscuity of the object? -.

The works call for reflection by confronting these images with representations of children's toys, also placed in the plane of the painting as three-dimensional objects, all in a plastic space that seeks to emulate – or discover- the tempo of chaos. The toy and its representation, in its simplicity and its obvious emotional load, are confronted with the distressing images of disposed cars. Nature in its most innocent form- childhood-faced with death, violence and absurdity.

The desire for progress seems to be seen here in its futility, facing the incomprehensible vastness of Time: "labors of lost love" of a humanity that bet all to the progress and fell silent in its nonsense, hard tasks of knowledge seeking assurance of an eternal well-being brought by industrialization and technology, now reverted against the very essence of humanism. Colmenárez may also talk to us about the solitude of art, of his art, always self-questioning about his essence, his sense and meanings.

Looking at the works in this exhibition, we understand that the aesthetics of Colmenárez is not indulgent. The multiplicity of the senses and relationships that activates in the spectator grants him a plastic density that is not consistent with the art made to please or ornament. It is a "procedural" work searching in each work a new discovery, an open work that involves the spectator, spurring his intelligence and sensitivity to take them to questionings that cast doubt on their own ethical and aesthetic conceptions.

Katherine Chacón
May, 2000

"Time, in its speed,
changes the course of things,
and often while abandoning us
is when it decides what a
long process could not arbitrate.”
William Shakespeare
Lost Love’s Sorrows

"Artwork is not material;
its essential material is reflective, conceptual.”
Asdrubal Colmenárez
Aesthetic Aphorisms