Reverón: the evanescent landscape

Abstract

This article investigates some aspects of Venezuelan painter Armando Reverón’s artwork (1889-1954), specifically the series known as “White Landscapes”, created between 1920 and 1940 in the Caribbean Coast. Within the works that belong to this series, the act of figuration has been taken, quite radically, to its very own limits: almost every color, except white, has been eliminated from the chromatic palette, an effect that critics have traditionally attributed to the excessive luminescence of tropical surroundings. However, here we’ll suggest that, in spite of Revron’s intense regard for locality and for the occurrence of the creative act both in time and space, his idiosyncratic return to “the landscape genre” also places him squarely on a much bigger quandary: the peak and critical comeback of landscapes as a significant form in Latin-American modern aesthetics. The critical analysis both of Reveron’s artwork and the skills that allow him to capture marginal scenarios can be put in the context of a discussion concerning the traits and features of the landscape genre in Western culture, and its relationship with modernity- the latter understood as a relational crisis between places and space.