artnexus #8

Our cover this time reproduces a work by Milton Becerra titled The Hunting of the Jaguar, which reflects a number of experiences from Becerra’s artistic career, his awareness of ecological themes, and his search for the essence of Latin America.

Bom in Colón, in the state of Táchira, Venezuela, in 1951, Becerra studied plastic arts and photography before collaborating in the workshop of Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Soto in Caracas and subse­ quently earning a degree inTine arts at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis).

He has lived in Paris since the 1980s, with his wife and assistant, Rosaura, and his two children. He regularly travels throughout Europe and back to Venezuela, where he has had a number of exhibitions and presented several ephemeral and permanent installations. His work is characterized by its serious research and its deep-seated mythical and cosmic elements. The work titled Xawara: Yanomami siglo XXI (which deals with death by the epidemic), which he presented at the Art Amazon project at the Museum of Modem Art in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 was subsequently shown as Klima Global Arte Amazonas at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Berlin. His work was also on show at the Sofia Imber Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Alejandro Otero Museum in Venezuela.

The Hunting of the Jaguar calls attention to the annihilation of our fauna and the extinction of indigenous cultures and the beauty of the "environment, the Venezuelan Orinoco, and the destruction of our rivers. But Becerra’s work goes beyond this ecological cry of alarm and encompasses its own internal solidity and coherence. Becerra transforms the stones, quartz, and other materials which he patiently weaves into magical objects that recall the earlier cultures of the Americas and yet at the same time strike us visually as being both contemporary and creative. (See the articles by Álvaro Medina, and Antonio Rodríguez.)

CELIA SREDNI DE BIRBRAGHER