Alexander Apóstol
Distrito 4, Madrid
When at the end of November of 1952, the Supreme Electoral Council of Venezuela suspended the ballot count corresponding to that year’s elections, the country entered a period of authoritarian rule under General Marcos Pérez Jiménez which would last six years. Adhering to many of the ideals inspired by Simón Bolívar’s nationalist premises, Pérez Jiménez’s six-year government witnessed the birth of the New National Ideal, an index of doctrinary bases that reflected the path to be followed by the country from that moment on, and that contemplated social and economic but also aesthetic actions.
It is in the revision of this last issue that Alexander Apóstol’s (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, 1968) most recent project, Ensayando la postura nacional, originates; a production in which he criti- cizes the artificiality of government-promoted aesthetics and re-creates a past which seems to be present. As a previous step to the analysis of the aesthetic ideals of the New National Ideal, one must consider several aspects which formed part of the new image of national identity, among them the invitation to European immigrants mainly Italian, Spanish and Portuguese to come to Venezuela and mix with the native inhabitants, for Pérez Jiménez believed that this would improve the ethnic qual- ity of the average Venezuelan national and also their attitude towards work and towards their civic duties.
As part of the aesthetic and uniform policies, Venezuelan artists were invited to perpetuate the figures of indigenous people, creoles, negroes, mestizos and Europeans as vigorous elements of the Venezuelan demographics. Among other painters, Pedro Centeno Vallenilla, trained in Mussolini’s Italy, crystallized in overelaborate scenes with a strong nationalistic background the aesthetic ideal fostered by Pérez Jiménez, thus becoming the official artist of this period. Apóstol takes these pictures as his point of departure for a video and a series of photographs of a variety of dimensions in which models of different races and popular classes attempt what has been termed the “national posture”, in a clear allusion to the pose that best rendered the New National Ideal. In the framework of some locations that were distorted in relation to time we find ourselves, for instance, inside a ‘perezjimenista’ palace transformed by the current government into offices the characters fail once and again in achieving the poses, unnatural on the pictorial plane and perhaps impossible in reality, which leads the spectator to wonder, in the presence of these works, whether every utopia is an always unfinished attempt to establish a new reality.
