The following critics have also written about this artist: Frank Poper Francis Parent Gaston Dihl Carmen Hernández Marta Leaño Katherine Chacón María Luz Cárdenas Alfredo Boulton Sofía Imber Eduardo Planchart Licea Juan Carlos Palenzuela Roberto Guevara Enrique Viloria Vera

Nomadic Lantency
by Eduardo Planchart Licea

Asdrúbal Colmenárez transmits to the series Nomadic Latency a strong pictoric dynamism through its gestuality, echo of the conceptual elements which he incorporates to this series: the sea, islands, deconstructed geography in imaginary spaces, images of magazines, naturalist drawings, plants, comics. A ludic sense is revealed in the structuring elements of the composition: the lines of light in ninety-degree angles or in a straight line which have resonance's with the seer, the colored papers cut with images of penguins printed on them, the postal stamps which direct the attention of the spectator to different perceptive levels. The gestualism as opposed to the grid of utopic coordinates creates a visual tension between chaos and order, which make reference to the planet perceived as a threatened totality. This problem appears evident in the plastic elements introduced, such as the images of animals, naturalist drawings of flowers and animals conceptually emblematic.

The postal stamp, with its characteristic circumference mutates in the visual center of the piece, becoming as well a way of emphasizing the notion of nomadic which characterizes our civilization, an echo of which is this series. We not only exist in a perennial toccata and fugue, but also the objects that surround us have a long traveling history. So, the forks with which we eat may be Chinese, English the plates, the clothing Korean… Among these wandering universes our days go by, yet they do not have the imprint to be identified as if pertaining to a cultural and natural space, then we go on creating an imaginary collage associating each one of these elements to their productive geography.

In spite of living in a global town, we exist in a mental universe that prevents us from identifying ourselves with the planet, as a living soul formed by millions of chains of life, being the humanity just one of them and at the same time our planetary system is less than a piece of dust in our galaxy. This is a known reality but in practice ignored by our civilizations. Instead, we continue trapped in a geocentric vision, born from Ptolemy, where the planet and the humanity are the center of the universe, thus arising the emphasis to minimize in this pictures the human presence when accenting the wild and marine life. This is the sense of the collage and its involving force in this series, which is stated in the visual centers transformed into plastic swirls which appear to absorb and melt all the aesthetic and conceptual contents, establishing the idea of interrelation which characterized the different forms of life on Earth.

In our planetary town, there has arisen a new type of nomadic, separated in part from the traditional societies and related to the expansion in time and space enabled by the postindustrial society. We are not only referring to the physical mobility of the human being, but to the cultural migration, where everything seems to belong to everyone. The visual culture through the electronic media has created new cultural categories: instant and simultaneous communications generate a new culture and a new way of learning, to the extent of creating aesthetics and ideologies, constantly recreated from the visual fragments of all the cultures with which we are faced. This is another sense of the collage in Asdrubal Colmenarez's proposal, this explains why among ethnographic maps and marine letters, he introduces natural elements such as leaves, confronting us this way to the paradoxical vision generated by the media when it leads us to confuse true reality with the reality born in the electronic media which is an illusion.

The natural elements in this pieces accent the abyss between our planetary reality and the image we have created from it, thus creating in our interior universe an imaginary puzzle. This explains why Asdrubal even includes in this series, fragments of a blank which puzzle to try and make us aware of the fragmentation and division that characterizes us. Stand out the rhythm and variety of the typographies, rooted in the use given to them by the Russian constructivism and the futurism, which are joined with images of comics added by him to certain works as an imprint of our cotidianity and of how we are lived by the archetypes created by electronic means, images directly linked to the pop art and the art as a way to bring us close to an archeology of our day to day.

This migration has turned the existence of the contemporary man into constant wandering between concrete jungles and imaginary spaces, the limits of which are no longer a region or a landscape but the whole extension of our planet, as the boundaries are minimized we have engaged in a contradictory conquer of the universe.

This conceptual content has been a constant since the nineties, in the work of Asdrubal Colmenarez, who inspires his plastic language in ships, boats, spacecrafts, ufos, coordinates of non existing geographies. In aesthetic terms, this contemporary nomadism is supported in plastic categories typical of modernism.

It is then established a continuous recycling of the accomplishments in different cultural contexts to give a false notion of novelty and renovation. Nevertheless, these propositions are nurtured from the cultural and spiritual roots of humanity, present in paradigmatic artists of our modernity and contemporaneity, as is the case of the abstract expressionism in people like Jackson Pollock, in the relation he establishes between his art and the sand drawings of shamanism of the North American Indians; in Mark Rothko and the vinculation of his monochromes with the non figurative conception of the divinity in the Hebraic culture; in Frank Stella who inspires his monochromes and his geometry in the African shields. This fact is also present in the anthropometrics by Yves Klein, which have a lot to do with archaic corporal designs.

At the present time there outstand Josep Beuys and his association with the shamanic nomadism, Anselm Kiefer for his fixation of the universal myths, from Babylon to contemporaneity through Mesoamerica. This proves that the cultural boundaries have been broken and art has become the echo of this universality, which instead of creating a homogeneous aesthetic concept, is giving birth to a hybrid diversity, an echo of which the series Nomadic Latency.

Elements such as craft paper together with the vegetal objects and consumer debris bring the proposition close to the postulates of the "arte povera" (poor art). We are before an approximation to the conceptual art that has been a constant in the work of Asdrubal Colmenarez. The show, in whole is a big puzzle, in the sense that each piece is interlaced with the other and at the same time each one has multiple aesthetic and whimsical echoes. The artist appears with this attitude to be mocking postmodernism, bringing us closer to the idea that there has not yet occurred the rupture that may have generated a new paradigm in art that transcends the limits of modernism, even though we may be well into the new millennium. This game of ideas is present in the piece where several 2000 are ludicly enchained. The rupture posted by postmodernism sunk in its own soil, thus the sense of the exhibition in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas Sofia Imber of 1998.

The existential pilgrimage Asdrubal Colmenarez's work is a projection of features of his internal dimension that materialize in his work. Sometimes they are linked to his origins (Colmenarez was born in Trujillo in 1936), and his first plastic proposition is linked to surrealism, technically inspired in his family roots, his father was a carpenter this period being a trip to the unconscious. His first creative works have the imprint of an internal nomadism.

Upon arriving in Paris at the end of the sixties he began his inquiries with the magnetic movement and the search for a relation with the public so as to desacralize the work and bring it closer to life, achieving his own ontological status, generating a revelation of the creative capacities of the spectator upon becoming in contact with the aesthetic dimension, generating strain between conceptual and constructivist expressions.

Psychomagnetics, are bands of thin metal on wood surfaces which, when touched, generate a wave movement which starts to create new forms uniting this action to lines drawn on their surfaces. With this work AC began to call the attention of the French critic and investigator Frank Popper, who makes a special mention of him in his Art book action and participation", in 1980. This stage of his language can be linked to that of the Brazilian Lygia Clark in the Trepantes series, made of metal and wood at the end of the fifties. In a few years the artist goes from professor of the School of Plastic Arts in Trujillo to professor of experimental art in Paris VIII. This evidences that what characterizes the life of the artist is the nomadic nature, developing his work between Europe and the tropic.

There are various key works from the beginning of the nineties where the concepts that have characterized the life of Asdrubal Colmenarez are present, which also appear in the series Mare Nostrum, shown in the MACCSI in 1993. Some pieces are autobiographical reflecting his wandering in time and space throughout his life, as can be felt in the work Series Mare Nostrum IV in 1992, where among imaginary coordinates there are points of existential meaning to the artist united in time and space, creating a diagram of his becoming.
This climate impregnates all the show of Mare Nostrum with the plastic and conceptual elements he introduces, such as maps, marine letters, compasses, transmitting this notion of imaginary trip that should carry the spectator to geographies only existing in the internal reality, sense that becomes one of the axis of the series Nomadic Latency.

Eduardo Planchart Licea