Damián Suárez: Paisaje Cinético

These promises have been tightly linked to the development of the op and kinetic art in the country. Executed with industrial precision, public works of Soto like Esphera Caracas (1997) or  Cruz-Diez’s Ambientación de Color Aditivo (1974) were the very language that the country used to broadcast the ideas of national renaissance to its citizens and the world, even when these ideas failed, pushing many, including Suárez himself, into exile.

It was in exile, first in Chile, and then in México where the artistic potential of Damián Suárez began to bloom with thread becoming a centerpoint of the artist’s identity. Fascinated with the tradition of threading widespread in Venezuela, the artist turned thread into his primary medium. In his works, Suárez masterfully exercises what Joseph Albers called “the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect” (the fact that two similar forms will never look the same in different contexts, the appearance of the form is context-dependent). Creating each of the canvases by hand with his own technique, Suárez allows chance and error to enter his creative process.

On the level of experience of the artwork, this creative gesture of breaking a visibly perfect pattern by a random thread develops into a fractal kinetic landscape, ever more complex upon a closer approach. On the conceptual level, however, this gesture becomes a statement. It is an opposition to industrial methods of production, the cleanliness of the earlier kinetic art, and a reference to manual production and tradition. In a performative gesture, Damián Suáres gives agency and voice to the tradition and community that inspired the artist but was largely dismissed in the name of progress after colonization.  It is also through this gesture and through almost ritualistic creative process of adding one thread after another that the artist returns the movement sought so passionately by the ones who preceded him to its original meaning in the pictorial space: to fascinate and mesmerize the viewer through the discrepancy between the physicality of his medium and the psychic effect it has.

The works of grand format presented at the Paisaje Cinético exhibition suggest a radical return to the search for evoking the movement. Perhaps it is the use of something as familiar as a textile thread for a medium, perhaps it’s a masterfully hidden complexity of the Suárez’s artistic process, one way or another, the works present the viewer with an opportunity to experience movement in an almost magical way, the way it was experienced by those who saw the first experiments of Impressionists or Kandinsky, or even by those who gazed upon the hand-painted figures at the walls of Altamira or Lascaux as the fire and stories brought those images to life.

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Anton Meshkov