The following critics have also written about this artist: Juan Carlos Palenzuela Bélgica Rodriguez Roberto Guevara Juan Calzadilla Perán Erminy Maria Elena Ramos Laura Antillano Federica Palomero

A Long Road
by Perán Erminy

It is not that Enrico Armas is not (as he certainly is) a deserving representative of the Armas lineage, a name that appears to possess the rare virtue of falling on very talented people, and not exactly armed ones, but on creative intellectuals and more specifically on artists. I refer to the direct and indirect heirs of Alfredo Armas Alfonzo, who are many, although some times they have a different name such as Antillano, etc.

It is not this what makes us think that Enrico Armas is a good painter. On the contrary, it makes us defensive from any possible favorable predisposition to sympathy. What I mean with this twisted argument is that the Enrico's name has nothing to do with the quality of his painting.

Enrico Armas is an artist who is still young in age, but already has a quite long and vast creative experience, not to say valuable and known. He first outstood in the field of sculpture with his famous and wonderful horses (with or without jockeys), with a vigorous and simple volumetric expression, some times overwhelming like the round nesses of Maillol's nudes, but with a certain archaic look, hieratic and extemporal, like the horses by Marino Marini.

Then he developed at the same time his constructivist abstractions, with lineal bars or ribs made of aluminum or other metals that intercross in very different forms of geometric three-dimensional tangles made of straight or curved lines, some times fine sometimes wide (like those of the Metro Station in Chacao). After that appeared his paintings, almost always abstract and constructivist, but spontaneous. The organization by grids (or checkerboards) and the saturated contrasting colors determined the nature of his works, produced by way of variations on one same composition scheme. I do not know if whose paintings were made at the same time with his initial sculptures or if the latter were made first.

He also cultivated other plastic techniques and genres, such as drawing, engraving and collage, but painting and sculpture always prevailed.

In any event, there can be felt in the development of Enrico Armas' production the continuity of his work and his conceptions. Although it happens in different lines of continuity or parallel axis of development, all of them are systematic where there may compatibly coexist abstract and figurative, painting and sculpture, geometry and gestures, construction and informality. He is never disperse neither incongruent, his personal seal can be easily identified.

Now, in this beautiful solo exhibition in the Galeria Medicci, the recent pictoric work of Enrico Armas has become more coherent than ever. Surpassing the remains of his gratuity and inconsistence in his preceding chromatic speculations, Enrico Armas now focuses his creative pictoric effort in maintaining a balance between his own inclinations to spontaneity and constructive rigor, between confidence in his sensitivity and orderly rationality, between emotion and reason.

His poetry stands in the middle of the old and always renewed quarrel between Apollonian and Dionysian. The same that referring to the great historic styles seemed to evolve as a pendulous between classic and baroque, or between neo-classic and romantic, or between expressionism and constructivism. In this sense, the balance proposed by Enrico Armas does not consist of conciliating the terms of duality of the antagonistic poles, between which his inspiration struggles, but in letting them antagonize without too much discordance, that is to say, maintaining the dichotomy as a kind of dialog and not a dispute between the opposites. This becomes a right recovery of the forgotten and never accepted, inexhaustible and so valid renaiscentist principle of the "coincidentia opositorum" according to which things may be opposite or contrary but similar.

In the case of Enrico Armas' present paintings, it is an unstable and precarious balance that works as a sort of visual counterpoint, or as a variable perceptive game of simultaneous or successive or superposed visual readings, needless of an order of prevalence or continuity. So in one same work there can prevail in a first moment the perception of a couple of structural orthogonal nucleus that immediately yield to the attraction of certain games of lightened chromatic contrasts. And then they give way to the vivacity of the strong traces of the gesture execution of the work. And so on, in a very variable and varied game of ever changing and polysemic perceptive possibilities that each one shall "read visually in his own way", feeling and understanding it as he pleases, without any fixed rules or any established appreciation rules.

The works by Enrico Armas are open works, very open, that is, of free interpretation, where there is no need to find them any expressive intention, unequivocal or invariable. They do not require a complex decodification nor possess hidden clues to be deciphered. They are not tight or hard pieces. On the contrary, their contents appear right there in the surface of the canvas, in the sensoriality of its thick and sticky pictorial matter, in the tension and distention generated by its planes and forms, in the successive excitement provoked by the visual stimulation of its contrasts of color, some times in crescendo, or with unexpected pauses or leaps, or lightening and fading while disappearing the contours and agitated again accelerating the visual journey, some times fluid or broken, or syncopated or some times hesitant, dubious… And that way, with the gaze flaming, distracted, incisive, excited, tense, serene, relaxed, joyous, cheerful, evocative, associative, evasive, dreaming, conceited… we let ourselves be carried by the energetic and affective stream of the work, navigating in our own sensations, while there outcrops from the bottom of the intellective and emotive communication, certain deep darkness or enlightment, all those things are given to us luxuriantly, profusely by Enrico Armas' pieces.

Caracas, Venezuela
November, 2000