FROM THE MARGINS OF DISENCHANTMENT
He was born the son of a painter in 1972 in Caracas, into a family that came from a small town in the east of the country. During the seventies and eighties, the decades of his growth and artistic training, the city lived through a rough environment that simultaneously testified to the successes and weaknesses of the promises of modernity. On the one hand, since the 1950s a large group of Venezuelan artists had vigorously assumed, and with an interesting added originality, the avant-garde tendencies affiliated with the experimentation of the European metropolis; In many ways the nation that dreamed of being modern, to use Ariel Jiménez's phrase, insisted on being realized… but also in that period, Caracas was already beginning to witness the failure of those dreams. The physical transformation already visible in the institutional and commercial architecture and in the road networks reached construction volumes that radically changed the appearance of the territory, at the same time that huge works were started that would never be completed. Also in artistic events - in the popularity of the various forms of abstractionism - relevant peaks of excellence were reached, underpinned by a formidable freedom of experimentation, while at the same time advancing a journey that took geometric abstraction to the unusual circuit of boom, popularity. , officialization to the point of monumentalization ... and disenchantment.
However, the disenchantment has produced generations of artists like Ovalles, who in the last three decades, even though they have not had the same contextual bonanza of their predecessors, have been tireless and creative to collect such a heritage and transform it, following their intuition or research processes underpinned in the context and in the theory produced by so many thinkers of the power of geometries in the art of the country. It should be noted that collecting the legacy of geometric abstraction has almost always meant using it from a variety of approaches of great critical, poetic and political sensitivity to reality, or more specifically, to the city, as is the case of Ovalles.
Nydia Gutierrez
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Available to buy
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Federico Ovalles, Edro hexagonal II, 2021
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Federico Ovalles, Edro hexagonal, 2021
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Federico Ovalles, Surface matter #13, 2021
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Federico Ovalles, Surface Matter #22, 2021
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