Luis Lizardo
Carmen Araujo Arte. Caracas
The title of this exhibition is somewhat disconcerting. Luis Lizardo (Venezuela, Caracas, 1956) is showing his recent work in the framework of the old coffeee drying patios of the Hacienda La Trinidad, in Caracas. The show has been named after Julio Llamazares’s book, El cielo de Madrid (The Madrid Sky). It features collages made up of fragments of travel post- cards; the constructive emphasis is achieved by means of the lines, edges and cutouts of those fragments. A rational mondrianesque puzzle in which the different shades of blues and ochers complete the compositional play.
Thus new images gradually appear and replace one’s own memories with other people’s images. These are not the Madrid skies; they are the artist’s personal recreation. They are the skies that were trapped in his memory. The spectator will share some fragment of these. Each per- son assumes his or her own. Some prefer a thin line of city buildings. Others prefer the skies of different environments: pale blue, overcast or misty. They are skies that have been imagined and conceived by others, and that the artist transmutes. He has not disdained the images outlined in the postcard, which have afforded it compositional strength, nor the edge, which provides other visual textures.
Besides being executed in small formats, they are transformed into intimist images: a communion between the spectator and the artist. For the former must come close to the works, and this results in an obligatory private conversation. The landscape in tree tops or mountains is treated in an anecdotal way, not to highlight it but to incorporate it as part of a composition. These “skies” are certainly a balm along the way. A parenthesis. The memory of an instant, a beautiful glimpse of a past.
