Avila Tempestad

In this series, the Venezuelan landscape is shown as a tempestuous composite of towering mountains, tropical rainforests, broad river plains, and shores of crashing waves, all of which provide a diversity of natural habitats that are symbolic of the increasingly accentuated set of challenges to social integration and economic development in the Caribbean country.

Oil and Landscapes

Artists have been painting the landscape since ancient times. The Greeks and Romans created wall paintings of landscapes and gardenscapes. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the tradition of depicting pure landscapes declined, and the landscape was seen only as a setting for religious and figural scenes.

The term “landscape” actually derives from the Dutch word landschap, which originally meant “region; a tract of land” but acquired the artistic connotation “a picture depicting scenery on land” in the early 1500s (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000).

The development of the term in the Netherlands at this time was logical because the Netherlands was one of the first places where the landscape had become a popular subject for painting.

In the late 18th century, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes changed the tide of landscape painting in France.

Like Poussin, he saw landscape painting as worthy of the status of history painting and worked to convince the Academy and his contemporaries.

Two Painters of Light

The English Romantic painter, printmaker, and watercolorist William Turner is known for his expressive coloring, imaginative landscapes, and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.

Turner became known as “the painter of light,” because of his increasing interest in brilliant colors as the main constituent in his landscapes and seascapes, painted in the 1830s.

During his “White” period in the 1920s, Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón, who would also be known as “the painter of light” painted coastal landscapes with monochromatic palettes imitative of the bright white light of the seashore.

These highly tactile paintings are unique to early modernism and seem to anticipate later monochromatic abstract art.

Avila Tempestad

These landscapes rearticulate the coasts of Reverón and Turner by unifying the violent nature of the tropics with both the realistic and abstract qualities inherent in oil paint.

Thus, the paintings echo the inner turmoil of “scattered subjects unable to feel together” within the same space as one and the same persuasive exchange (Derrida).