🎨 Artistic space #17 - Armando Reverón, the magician of light
Artist and painter, the work of Armando Reverón, realized in great part in the Central Coast of Venezuela, captures and transmits all the luminosity of the tropic. Reverón was also an outstanding member of the Academy of Fine Arts, along with figures such as Manuel Cabré, Antonio Edmundo Monsanto and César Prieto. As for his childhood, it is known from testimonies of the time, that a few years after being born in Caracas was given in upbringing by his mother to a couple from Valencia, the Rodriguez Zocca, who took care of his first education. His maternal great-uncle, Ricardo Montilla, who had studied painting in New York, was the person who contributed in a definitive way to awaken his artistic vocation. In 1904, he lived with his mother in Caracas and in 1908, he enrolled in the Academia de Bellas Artes, where his teachers were Antonio Herrera Toro, Emilio Mauri, and Pedro Zerpa.
His performance earned him the recommendation of his teachers to obtain, at the end of the course of 1911, a pension for studies in Europe. That same year, he traveled to Spain and went to Barcelona, where he entered the School of Arts and Crafts. In 1912, he made a brief return to Caracas; again in Spain, he entered the San Fernando Academy in Madrid. According to some scholars of his life and work, the Spanish capital left a deep mark on his spirit; he was also captivated by the universe of Francisco Goya. Later, he will remember his passage through the workshop of Moreno Carbonero, a somewhat extravagant painter, master of Salvador Dalí. He returned to Venezuela in mid-1915. Once in Caracas, he resumes his work while attending the sessions of the exclusive Circle of Fine Arts. Although he was absent from Caracas at the time of the creation of the Circle, its founders considered him one of their own.
In 1916, Reverón paints outdoors his first landscapes resolved within a blue tonality. Shortly thereafter he moved to La Guaira where he lived to give private classes in drawing and painting. There he met Juanita Mota, who would be his model and inseparable companion, during the 1918 carnival. Also in La Guaira, is the Russian-born painter Nicolás Ferdinandov, whom he had met in Caracas the previous year. During this time Reverón frequently visits the fishermen's ranch that the Russian painter used to occupy in Punta de Mulatos. Following Ferdinandov's advice, Reverón decides to settle on the coast, thus initiating a new stage in his life and work. By 1921, he lived on a ranch on the beach, in the sector of The Fifteen Letters.
The Baths of Macuto
Shortly after, he moved and began to build, a little to the south, the derrick that would serve as his dwelling for the rest of his life. This decision also coincided with a change of behavior and, of course, a transformation of his artistic concepts. In this period, by adopting primitive habits and detached from the city, Reverón was able to develop a deeper perception of nature and this led him to employ a method of painting, as well as to adopt procedures and materials adapted to his eagerness to represent the atmosphere of the landscape under the effects of the glare produced by direct sunlight. In addition, he created chromatic values and devised new supports, using autochthonous elements. He thus entered what the critic Alfredo Boulton called his "White Age", located approximately between 1924 and 1932.
In 1933, he received his first recognition when an exhibition of his work was held at the Caracas Athenaeum, which was later presented at the Katia Granoff Gallery in Paris. At the beginning of 1940, he began his "sepia period", which would correspond to a set of canvases painted on the coast and in the port of La Guaira and where the brown tones of the mopper support constitute the dominant chromatic value of the composition; landscapes of sea and land where the marinas of the playón stand out, followed by a depressive period after the artist suffered a psychotic crisis that forced his reclusion in the Sanatorium Saint Jorge, by José María Final.
Recovered, he did not return to painting as before. From this moment on, he took refuge in a magical universe that, around objects and dolls created by him, gave rise to the last and delirious expressionist stage of his work; a figurative stage characterized by the use of materials such as chalk, crayons and a theatrical fantasy that became more and more uncontrollable but which, through a drawing that aspired to academic correction, sought to restore Reverón's emotional balance.
The last of his crimes took place in 1953 when he was again interned in the clinic of Báez Finol, the same year in which he was awarded the National Painting Prize. Comforted by this late stimulus, he worked hard for an exhibition that had been announced by the museum of fine arts, when he died while he was in the San Jorge Sanatorium.
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