Bélgica Rodríguez

Artistic production began in the XXI century battling for its identity. While the technological means have taken over much of that battle, art, the noble art, does not fade and to maintain its historical space, its achievements and findings, always goes to the war instruments inherent to it: its plastics values. Good artists and creators are, and will be, their gladiators. The work of Asdrubal Colmenárez claims victory; it is a step ahead of his generation. In reviewing the history of this multifaceted man one can perceive an obsession for the relationships between different and distinct elements that violate conventional rules, as well as an addiction to changes in format, dimensions, materials, and unique and multiplying proposals. While on the plane or in the physical space, he presents epic contents using the literary resources such as the Odyssey, Ulysses or King Oedipus, or by appealing to memories of trips or heartaches, and as in Erotika, sensual and evocative work, to revelations of love games in dream worlds. The observer as an intense voyeur watches and observes this game of intimate nudity, discovering it through the keyhole, after covering an intricate surface of lines and color spots.

From the majesty of the Venezuelan Andes, Colmenarez traveled directly to Paris. He studied at the University of Vincennes with Frank Popper, a theorist and historian of kinetic art, was his assistant and then professor of contemporary art at the university; from his retirement from teaching until today, he is entirely devoted to his creative work. In the journey prior to the trip to Europe he was a painter of surrealist tendency, but at the end of the sixties kinetic proposals were part of an intense investigation that led him to develop kinetic-visual speeches, whose final reading involved the full participation of the viewer: sensory and perceptual, psychological and emotional. These factors, added an important recreational component; interplay between artist, work and receiver. Since the exhibitions Tactile Psycho-magnetic (1976), Multisensory Alphabet (1978) and Manageable Structures (1981), he defined several constants for his work, for example the meaning of multisensory, writing displayed in graffiti, the letter, the phrase or word, perceptible movement in the flow, the changeable and the unstable, as well as the role of the observer. As an artist who works in a variety of mixed media, he has expressed himself in painting, sculpture, reliefs, performance, and installations; starting from significant breaks with certain codes of the re-presentation, he has been based on compositional structures resolved according to a formal order, defining an artistic reality simultaneously figurative, abstract and conceptual. By fragmenting shapes, images, color and planes and inserting visual situations seemingly inarticulate, his visual speech rules out linear connections between what he shows and who perceives it and feels it.
His proposals and findings have taken him beyond the borders of the historical and contemporary avant-garde to a post contemporaneity without rhetoric or visual decorations or conceptually discursive. Since his beginnings he broke with the Euclidean tradition in the history of art, basing his disconcerting especially on cubist and kinetic principles, two trends that helped change the course of the history of art of the XX century.

His themes, historically unchanged, are visible and readable by a reading that breaks the normal consistency of a landscape or scenery (human, urban or natural), and locates man in unprecedented harmony on it. A good example is the series Lost Heartaches (1999), when the fragmented urban landscape is reconstructed as a graveyard of cars on simultaneous violence of planes, sometimes sweetened or demonized, by a teddy bear or a couple of plastic dolls. This situation is repeated throughout his work, the artist introduces annotations, visual and literary, superimposed as in dreams, which complicate meanings and contents. In Voyage, an exhibition of 2001, these notes are opposed to the possible poetic perception of a landscape by the multiple and labyrinth like composition, in which patches of color, lines, shapes, act as juxtaposed curtains or as Odysseus's Journey and Odyssée Night, 2004 and King Oedipus, Labyrinth of the Being, 2006, when the structure of the surface of the works is more complex, turning a literary epic in an epic vision. The strength of the plastic-formal resolutions, of concept and idea, the work draws the viewer through the semiological load of the various speeches and multiple meanings that run there. Speeches that being interpreted as the collective concept of identity, resulting in the encounter of a genesis of Western art with a post contemporaneity.

In the light of art history and plastic trends of the XX century, Colmenárez proposes absolute discontinuity of the plane. In the two-dimensional shapes and figures floating in space, while color, lines and volumes, mark and define that space. In the three- dimensional, this discontinuity occurs in the transition between volumes, some disrupted by disconcerting added in flagrant opposition of the solid with the soft, the heavy with the light. The artist does not synthesize his life occurrences; on the contrary, he transforms them in baroque. An analysis and reflection leads to consider this work as a result of important allusions to the historical avant-garde, to various themes and a visual aesthetic conception of the visual fact based on the horror of emptiness, all of it expressed in structures of multiple approaches, when appropriating of modern and contemporary art, history making hi Cubism, Surrealism, kinetic art, action painting, abstractionism, expressionism and in epic tone he generates grandeur. As in dreams, he intermingles situations, unites them in labored fabrics and integrates a group of overlapping images, juxtaposed, intertwined, to which the viewer has access only through a crack of his perceptive capacity. Violence? Of course. This area is as violent as those that have changed the course of a history, but the tenderness of the one who finds the notion of a divine order is sensed. Within volcanic an apparent volcanic disorder, the artist expresses harmony and balance. His is a creating universe solved in two ways: abandonment and the search of perfection, instances in which he is inscribed, as significant connotation, the most intimate of the human being and his circumstances.

In Erotika, two are Colmenárez’s obsessions: the erotic as a theme, visually resolved in the complex plastic-formal of the composite structure and the exacerbation of a mixed technique that almost reaches the edge of the unacceptable: solid set of surreal structures supported on the relationship, unconscious and automatic, of images floating devoted to a glorious game of love. Passions and desires that derive into the forbidden, lonely characters united by an almost amorphous universe.

In works such as Timeless, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Homage to Courbet, the game is clear, the characters, suspended in the emptiness give each other over pushed toward the viewer for glazing, transparencies and crossing of shapes, colors, lines, letters, phrases, circles and many other elements.

Regarding this exhibition, the artist mentions his interest, and even inspired, by George Bataille's erotic literature (1897-1962). But the erotic in his plastic work is not new as presence, atmosphere and energy while Bataille builds a literary monument defined as an extraordinary example of the twentieth-century Gothic novel, Asdrubal Colmenárez builts a monument of great richness and visual exuberance that could also be defined , as Bataille’s style as "gothic." In Erotika, the artist controls his "Gothic" universe; through intimate atmospheres and domestic formats, he covers paths of nooks and crannies, takes out of the closets, delves into the personal and collective memory and with images of passionate and thoughtful expressionism, he builds abstract-figurative scenarios of polysemic meanings; taking collage to extreme richness and exuberance, he shows his strong challenge to academic art conventions. Referring to the literature of George Bataille, Octavio Paz, he speaks about the writer’s rejection to the impregnable citadel of dogmas, precisely what Colmenárez has posed to by turning to visual violence, thematic aggression, the sensuality of the stabbing as opposed to the curved, to shameless sex, to tart humor, the naked bodies that writhe in sensual rhythms, without antagonism or subordination, they and the images are there, living their own life.

Asdrubal Colmenárez has not been a victim of the gods, like Odysseus or Oedipus, on the contrary, he is protected by them. His work responds to a call for independence, freedom and challenge, challenges and risks, prerogatives that belong only to the creator. Creative and human, he has led his work to highlighting moments, undertaking many trips, first from his own life, then from his memories, existential, poetic and artistic, it is from there that the nomadic man and philosopher of art and life, weaves the net under its shadow he hides to appear glowing in the light of a work of art.

Caracas, April 2008

From its beginnings, its work falls within the cinetismo, to which it incorporates other elements like the ludic resource and the participation of the public in the work, in such a way that this becomes not only a transforming element of the work but in a component Essential in them

Read more: Asdrúbal Colmenárez

Luis Arocha Mariño

I must confess that after seeing the work that this time presents the master Asdrubal Colmenares, and thanks to the invitation of Tomas Kepets, to refer to the subject of eroticism, I experienced a feeling of taking a closer look. A feeling of having been touched by the history of art in its entirety, as usually happens to me with all his work, I touched the soul that this time I connected, not only with the aesthetic character itself, but because I experienced the anxiety that the theme- excuse produces in the human soul and that Tomas had suggested. I’m referring, of course, to eroticism and its relationship with life, expression of the natural insurance that the Major Mother guarantees "the stubbornness of nature", as noted by the researcher Steven Pinker.

It has never ceased to arouse my curiosity that a lot of artists, as they age and plastically mature they inevitably increase the interest and the expression for the erotic phenomenon. Some explanatory trends state that with the decline of maturity comes less interest in the carnal libidinous. However, experiences indicate otherwise, the interest and appeal for the voluptuous, and passion far from diminishing is increased in the mind of the mature human and if certain favorable circumstances occur, it can be fully enjoyed.

Because I understand that there is an important key to understanding this contradictory attitude we usually find in the Western world: The effect of censorship that sinks roots in a tradition of religious and moral order. This double attitude towards sex, which on the one hand we accept it as an important spark for a full life, and on the other, we are ashamed or debate or criticize when debated or publicly expressed, and that is maintained despite the movement to rescue the value of happy sex and attuned to our daily lives. Perhaps it was St. Augustine of Hipona who raised more severely the need for total control over the sexual life, which caused the Catholic to become moral paladin of modesty and privacy in sexual matters.

Botticelli, Michelangelo, among many artists had to get around in order being able to show the human nudity without going through the prohibitions which in said matter exercised,-and-exercises- the Catholic religion in this regard. Their works, marked by a discreet demonstration of the "private parts” testify it. I still remember a priest, teacher of the already distant high school years, covering the sexual areas of the anatomical models he used. In the Western world this attitude of ambiguous relationship with the sexual is also reflected in the use of language: we establish categorical distinctions between sensuality, eroticism and pornography, as a sign of concern when talking about a troublesome issue and how it should be addressed. The warnings of our media laws also reflect this version of morality by classifying programs into three major areas of disturbance: language, sex and violence. This leads us to suspect that it compares sex with violence! Two totally different issues and contrary functions: one is how we strengthen ourselves and give life, the other its destruction.

Undoubtedly, the risks associated with sexual intercourse and the magnitude of responses, particularly of the male, after experiencing an orgasm, have contributed to the creation of the myth of sex as forbidden, limiting, evil ... Unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, emotional disorders and changes in attitudes towards the responsibilities and the consequences of "solitary vice" such as apathy, loss of vital energy, etc. only serve to strengthen the need for that sexual life should be controlled and managed as if it were a non renewable resource. Even a few years ago, we read a story which stated that French researchers had found that the number of possible orgasms in men was limited to 3,000! Well, well ... it could be around there. It is well known that whatever we do has risks and assurances; including of course the pertinent to the erotic and here it is a reflection of where the limits of our action against the libidinal are.

While there have been innumerable attempts to teach sex education with the rest of formal education, two powerful signs indicate that we are still far from a peaceful and honest treatment with respect to the erotic. The abundant presence of jokes that refer to this condition reflects how disturbing is to share the subject, and the fact that most schools and families addressing it, either give it an aseptic treatment (the famous bees and seeds) or leave aside the most dissipated of the sexual encounter: It is a having a great time!. Perhaps the fear of getting out of control on the consequences of carnal attraction is still very threatening to the Western culture.

Just recalling the famous words of Marcel Proust before the first love with a strong lustful load: "Love is a bad luck like in the stories, against which nothing can be done as long as the spell remains" (In: "In search of lost time. On the road to Swan "). We all know of the violent and disturbing behaviors when we are eroticized in a relationship. Many times recalls the frenzy with which the elephants attack everything in their path. Each one of us has at least one story in the family, neighborhood, work ... and life itself. These facts surely contributed to the creation of the myth, of how dangerous and prohibited is approaching the issue of passion linked to the genital.

As it usually happens in all human affairs, many artists have irreverently responded to such moral reserves: Picasso with his erotic drawings or Schiele (I think at this point in the "red host”, where Egon is shown with a huge red penis, caressed by a lady that accompanies him), examples of "disrespectful" that merely provoke the "moralists" who bought the ecumenical version of the role of eroticism in our everyday life, without self-criticism and real consideration of the scope and possible consequences of a visual expression of the subject. And as L. Wittgenstein points out, "the world is the size of my language," here the erotic and pornographic terms are brushed, which will be used depending on the license that the interested person wants to grant to the artist.

After all, and with the passing of time we have expanded the range of observation, analysis and criticism of human evolution and it is surprising how local culture creates the realities that we share. In such a way that in the XXI century, we are still caught in the ambiguity over the phenomenon of the particularly provocative way species reproduce: For example, when we look and talk about Tantric, one of the oldest religions in the world, we are moved by the faces of surprise, disgust or embarrassment when it is explained to facilitate the understanding of the listeners, that the equivalent of the Catholic communion is the sexual relation and the total enjoyment and taken to the extreme of excitatory support of female orgasm as a guarantee of admiration, veneration and worship of God or his equivalents.

Or when it is said that going to a tantric temple is to look at sculptures and bas-reliefs with different positions or group sexual experiences, taking the place in Catholic churches that is reserved for representations of holy innocent, aseptic and asexual! Bewilderingly impresses the neophytes, when we show pictures of a man using her mouth, hands and feet simultaneously in the corresponding five vaginas belonging to joyful women and lead to high and extreme pleasure, because it is a religious-porno- erotic rite without hesitation or contradiction. In this frame of considerations and turning our gaze to the paintings of Asdrubal Colmenares, it is a pleasure to find this giant of Venezuelan art, whom we have seen in previous years building pictorial symbols marked by a systemic game of the evolution of art techniques, shown in different excuses: geometric lines, ships, the jungle of language, cars, everyday life in the streets of Paris, New York, Caracas ... now in this seductive side where the great master of Venezuelan art does not obviate the heart of our possibilities of existence:

This atavistic attraction which impels us to take our bodies as the center of the events in life. After all, it is the expeditious way to the greatest joy, and the possibility of creating the fundamental core, the family and children, to continue the adventure that began a little over 40,000 years in the remote steppes of Africa and we have not stopped until today, and we will surely continue to expand "until San Juan bends the finger": The transformation of nature in our image and likeness, it is precisely because of the existence of libidinal impulse and the need to express it, that such an adventure is possible .

Caracas, Venezuela
April  2008