A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a private exhibition featuring the supreme Venezuelan op-art artist Carlos Cruz Diez. This meeting was even more meaningful to me because I had just submitted an essay titled “The Failure of Decreed Realities: Modern Art in Public Spaces in Venezuela,” and I had some questions from that essay that I wanted to ask one of the remaining Venezuelan artists whose work had once enjoyed favor from the country’s upper political class.
The essence of my essay, as the title clearly suggests, was to argue that reality cannot be changed by decree. Dictators and similar figures have attempted this in the past, and given that Cruz Diez once believed that “the artist must be totally committed to their immediate sociopolitical reality” and that art was “another means to reflect reality and achieve Latino-American dignity,” positions clearly tied to the prevailing political climate, I certainly wasn’t going to miss the chance to question him on these topics.
To be honest, it was quite exceptional to hear someone of Cruz Diez’s caliber going against previous ideological positions and admitting, quite frankly, that in the case of Venezuela, art had an insignificant impact, if any, on reality. My questions were aimed, of course, at determining whether past administrations had managed to alter the sociopolitical reality of Venezuelans by decree or if commissioning artworks for public display had, in any way, socially or politically changed Venezuelans. Cruz Diez remarked, “No boy, if I had known then…”, suggesting that his reasoning in the 60s and 70s was based on a positivist reality which the governments of that time attempted to impose, but unsuccessfully.
Another question I posed was about the current regime’s use of red. I mentioned that the country has become drenched in red, and by associating or painting Bolívar red, the masters of Chávez’s propaganda were essentially betting on the capital of an icon already deeply rooted in most Venezuelans. Very clever and particularly aimed at largely unaware masses, for whom political messages need to be written in language easily digestible without much questioning: reading images. In fact, chavismo’s production in this sense surpasses, by far, literary output, whose creators have catastrophically failed to generate innovative and creative ideas/concepts to disseminate the doctrine of ‘21st Century Socialism’. I argued that color had been at the forefront of artistic revolutions in Venezuela for a long time, to which he agreed, emphasizing that was one of the reasons he decided to seek color itself, rather than using color as part of something else.
Within the Venezuelan context, Cruz Diez believes that both artists and politicians are equally incapable of bringing about long-term change in people’s behavior, as this can only be achieved through education. He commented on the irony of going from being one of the favored artists to being marginalized by the current regime, all without having changed his work.