Ismael Mundaray: Mémoires d'un fleuve

For nearly 40 years, Ismael Mundaray has developed a unique work on the cultures and landscapes of his native Venezuela. From September 22 to November 05, 2022, the Memoirs of a River exhibition will present a part of his Amazon project started by the artist in 2018. On this occasion, a catalog will be published presenting this new theme with a writing by Bélgica Rodríguez, researcher and visual arts critic, specialist in Latin American art and former President of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

 

The artist, Ismael Mundaray, born in 1952 in Caripito, Venezuela, was trained at the Cristóbal Rojas School of Visual Arts in Caracas and became a teacher during the 1980s and 90s at the Regional School of Plastic Arts in the Martinique. 

 

During the 1980s, Ismael Mundaray began to study and practice graphic techniques and from there later moved towards painting, the medium at the center of his work. Mundaray, constantly concerned with topical issues in Venezuela, addresses various themes around his country, ranging from cocoa through religious syncretism, the legend of peoples, to the cosmogonies and domestic life of different venezuelans indigenous communities. His work is anchored in contemporary pictorial languages, in which he defends a creative position outside the traditional canons and performs work that places him among the important artists of Venezuela.

On the occasion of the first presentation of the Amazon project, Bélgica Rodríguez describes and deciphers this new orientation of the artist in her text Ismael Mundaray, an inner dialogue with the Amazon. Memories of imaginary paths: “Each series of paintings by Ismael Mundaray is a project. As he himself admits, nothing is fortuitous, everything has an origin, hence the consequent vital trajectory that begins with the sensitive child who is moved by the majesty of a natural landscape observed more with the mind than as a daily manifestation of nature. The Landscape is the theme of this new painting series from Mundaray. Observing these paintings, it is almost impossible not to associate them with a visual poetic narrative that refers to «submerged alphabets», to waters with iridescent reflections, to territories inhabited by invisible elves who, however, manifest themselves through nebulous tremors of color-light.”

 

This color-light evoked by Bélgica Rodríguez is particularly important in Mundaray’s landscape work, approaching the great masters of abstract art and kinetic art as she tells us: «The compositional structure of these paintings is characteristic of the naturalistic landscape. The horizontal parallel fringes – little delimited in this case – insinuate the subliminal current between the line of the horizon and the subtle chromatic atmospheres which seem to evaporate under the eyes of the spectator. An important aspect is the incidence of light on the paint surface, which affects the visual behavior of the color. The vision of the landscape presented by Mundaray is new and fresh, it comes very close to the optical successes of the chromosaturations of Carlos Cruz Diez. They are anti-realistic and anti-dramatic landscapes, rather in relation to the spatial character of the mixture of colors of various shades and dimensions which generate colored atmospheres out of the medium.

 

Within the gallery, in 2001, Ismael Mundaray produced the exhibition entitled Traversée, bringing together works that approached the universe of Venezuelan indigenous cultures and their environment. This exhibition inaugurated his major project From the Orinoco to the Seine. The presentation of the Memoirs of a River exhibition is thus the continuation of this major project.

 

On the occasion of this new exhibition, the viewer will have the opportunity to discover several series of the Amazon project. By their titles, they describe the changes of the river as well as the memories of the artist: Río Crecido, Tree of life, Marea Baja, En el Río, Tierra

Madre, Tierra Madre Tepuy.

If at first glance, this exhibition may seem very personal with memories specific to the artists, the «Sublime» aspect of the landscapes and the mysterious atmospheres present in the works lead the viewer into a kind of introspection. These region-specific landscapes ultimately become universal images. Thanks to this color-light so pregnant, each spectator can appropriate these landscapes and thus recall their personal memories of their own native land.