Francisco Narváez
Encyclopedia
Venezuela's most important sculptor by popular acclamation, Francisco Narváez inaugurated his country's age of modernism at the start of the 1930s, returning from three years in Paris and instantly catalyzing the national culture. The son of a well-known cabinetmaker in Porlamar, Narváez practiced woodcarving at an early age before beginning his formal training at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1922. At that time, Venezuelan sculpture was still mired in a dated academicism, its dominant technique wax or clay modeling and its narrative subjects mostly catered to the statuary demands of the state. Within such a "sleepy and incurious environment," a critic for the magazine Elite wrote on the occasion of the artist's first solo exhibition, the early promise of Narváez boded well for the renewal of Venezuela's sculptural tradition: "The artist and the medium are evolving almost simultaneously, the stimulus of one synchronizing with the other."(1) Narváez's sculptural evolution would take a dramatic step forward during his time in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian and studied the origins of modern sculpture in the work of Rodin, Maillol and Bourdelle, whose expressive naturalism and physical intensity would leave a lasting impression.
Narváez returned to Caracas in 1931 and opened a studio in the working-class neighborhood of Catia that immediately became a gathering place for Venezuela's avant-garde. Stimulated by the growing national sentiment shared by this young intelligentsia, he began to work out the problems of figurative, volumetric sculpture in works that took the country's indigenous mestizo population and vernacular themes in general as their principal subjects. The artist's important criollista period lasted through the mid-1940s, and in works such as the present Criollas he demonstrated a powerful ability to integrate his nativist interests with a more and more refined carving technique, modernizing a local tradition of woodcarving that had languished since colonial times. "The Creole women, blacks, and Indian women that populate these works are men and women engaged in their daily routine," Katherine Chacón has observed, "but they are also compact masses, concatenations of curves and volumes, and smoothly shifting light reflected on polished surfaces. They become pretexts for volumes of stylized elegance, signaling a break with the narrative character of previous sculpture in favor of expressive form and matter. Here, Narváez displays his technical mastery as a carver. He uses minimal resources, saving details to achieve a notable synthesis in forms that represent their essential features."
Francisco Narváez (1905–1982) was a Venezuela
n sculptor.
Narváez returned to Caracas in 1931 and opened a studio in the working-class neighborhood of Catia that immediately became a gathering place for Venezuela's avant-garde. Stimulated by the growing national sentiment shared by this young intelligentsia, he began to work out the problems of figurative, volumetric sculpture in works that took the country's indigenous mestizo population and vernacular themes in general as their principal subjects. The artist's important criollista period lasted through the mid-1940s, and in works such as the present Criollas he demonstrated a powerful ability to integrate his nativist interests with a more and more refined carving technique, modernizing a local tradition of woodcarving that had languished since colonial times. "The Creole women, blacks, and Indian women that populate these works are men and women engaged in their daily routine," Katherine Chacón has observed, "but they are also compact masses, concatenations of curves and volumes, and smoothly shifting light reflected on polished surfaces. They become pretexts for volumes of stylized elegance, signaling a break with the narrative character of previous sculpture in favor of expressive form and matter. Here, Narváez displays his technical mastery as a carver. He uses minimal resources, saving details to achieve a notable synthesis in forms that represent their essential features."
Francisco Narváez (1905–1982) was a Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
n sculptor.