"bit international" and the eternal problematic of not having a real home.
This exhibition shows an important collection of computer and modern art of the Museum of Contemporary Arts of Zagreb, Croatia. Especially the constructivist and op art periods are reflected within the collection. In between the pieces, as part of the history of tendencies in art, stands the work of Jesús Rafael Soto, a Venezuelan artist that lived in Paris most of his life and is one of the most important figures of the contemporary arts of my country. The influence of this artist in other tendencies is remarkable and spread throughout the geography of the Latin-American world.
The collection has at least two pieces of the artist. These works by Soto are a perfect representation of his importance. Nevertheless a curious situation came to my eyes, an exception that changed my day and my way of seeing the exhibition producing mixed feelings in my persona: there was a small piece of plastic, wood and metal that I immediately recognized as one of the Soto’s models for a bigger sculpture, that has a huge relation to another piece of the collection and that to my surprise was named after another artist. Confused I went to the hotel to look for information about Jean Pierre Yvaral, another artist I knew from my studies of history of art and that I was sure did very different and parallel work to Soto.
Yvaral
Instabilité, 1963
After the certainty that the work was misnamed and not correctly archived, I decided to communicate with the curator of the exhibition in Zagreb. This adventure of course was not that simple and was unfruitful. Then my feelings started to bug me and a small nostalgia for my country arose. It would be so simple to talk about this with the correct person inside a museum in Caracas, not because of my person, or my visibility over there, but because of the small world and connected structure that exists in the world of art of my country. There everybody is capable of saying with certitude who might be the right person to solve a problem like that one. Probably the person would be Ariel Jimenez, curator of the collection Cisneros for Latin-American art and who has a personal interest in Soto’s work or maybe even, Luis Henrique Pérez Oramas, curator for Latin-American art in the MOMA of New York, probably with the Soto Atelier in Paris or other institution, but there, in Graz no possibility existed.
Therefore a strange sensation of void entered my horizon, a huge sadness and a greater necessity of having interlocutors for the problems. There in this terrible sentiment, I revisited my eternal dilemma of not having, for a long period, a real home. A fragile terrain of the “in-between”.
