Modernity and desolation

9 september

In a recent exposition I attended, there was a small geometrical painting from Vasarely. It is nothing like his most known work, those collection of geometrical designs that appear to pop out from the canvas into your brain, agitating colors and pulsions straight into your consciousness without touching your logic. This painting fitted perfectly in the exposition, designed around the dawn of modernity, the beginning of the twentieth century. The most known work of Vasarely is more fit for the decor of a science fiction movie of the eighties, deranged and full colored. Not this one then, just another abstract painting in a diversity of abstract work. Which got me thinking in the intrinsic diversity of pretty much everything you want to focus upon. Don’t even think about Vasarely. Think in the diversity between the modernists themselves. What could possibly link Leger and Dali? Or Diego Rivera and Chirico? And yet, all these people interacted with each other, loved each other, hated each other, and in the process, defined pretty much all our current aesthetics.

In a way, that diversity is intrinsic to a moment in which all the doors seemed to be opened, and quite some few more were hemmed in the walls. It is not for nothing that a troubled country like Spain would sustain, even create, Picasso. And Dali. And what about Miro? And Gris? For me it is terrible to consider that such tumultuous creative moment would end up, not that many years after, in the nightmare of Guernica, and the Spanish Civil War itself. Are we doomed to have great periods of creativity followed by the destruction of meaningless wars? I don’t think so, but I neither believe it is pure coincidence that precisely that explosion of creativity that we today call modernity, was followed by the Holocaust.

Never mind Caracas in the seventies and the eighties, and the tabula rasa of Chavismo afterwards.

Let’s go back to Vasarely. Nowadays I am not particularly impressed by his flashy creations. And yet, he occupies a cherished place in my mind. It was indeed the late seventies, or the very early eighties, and a Venezuelan museum showed a retrospective on his work. Somehow I ended up in the inauguration, just arrived to Caracas, about eight or perhaps nine years old, totally transfixed by the colors and the sense of space popping out of the canvas. At some point, my mother took me by the hand and settle us asides. There was a growing tension in the air, and more and more frequently we hear “the man is coming, the man is coming”. Eventually he came indeed. “The man” was how venezuelans called, at least then, our president Carlos Andres Perez. In despite, or perhaps due to his having been minister of interior, responsible for extermining the last remanents of the sixties guerrilla, he was hugely popular. And there he was, walking with his characteristic brisky steps into a public exposition, not quite surrounded by bodyguards that had been left behind, and beaming his charming smile to the educated crowds, making conversation here and there, irresistible. I could not believe my eyes. Coming from Videla’s dictatorship, a junta of also genocidal militars that actually looked exactly as what they were, this tropical storm of a man left no doubt in us that we had landed not even in another country, but perhaps in another universe altogether, decorated by, obviously, Vasarely.

Besides this anecdote, this is indeed what I remember from these years. Caracas brimmed and trembled in a maelstrom of opportunities. It wasn’t only that a small banana republic could actually organize a retrospective of a mayor modern painter.  Universities were fully loaded with academics from the whole world, and a Venezuelan had recently put together the OPEC, a cartel of oil producers that back then looked capable of bending the aeternal rules that gave all the power to developed nations. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela suddenly controlled the markets were their goods were traded. Wasn’t that incredible? Wasn’t all of it incredible, just like those volumes of Vasarely coming out from flat canvas?

It was indeed.

And then I wonder if that diversity didn’t also contain the seeds of its own destruction, a couple of decades later. I actually don’t wonder, I am sure of it. At the side of that great creativity, there was great poverty. Carlos Andres Peres was reelected twenty years later, the country already in deep economical malaise, and few weeks later faced the first coup attempt, by a then unknown paratrooper, Hugo Chavez. Just like the european twenties, when everything seemed possible, were followed by the desolation of war, the brilliant Venezuelan seventies and eighties were followed by the dark and grey night of chavismo.

One should not be cause of the other. But is it really a coincidence?