Antonio Ugarte: River Song

The William Werner Hall of the Centro de Artes Integradas presents the exhibition entitled River Song by Venezuelan artists Antonio Ugarte, who returns to his native country with a show that includes, paintings, photographs, and installations that are conceptually centered on water and flowers.

Water has been a recurrent theme in the work by Antonio Ugarte since the 1990s and, according to Susan Benko, curator of this exhibition, it is a theme that he did not began to use accidentally, as "it was the result of a chain of events that allowed this artist to take part of his work on this direction."

Before Ugarte settled down in Paris in 1994, his work was inhabited by characters and athletes depicted in a variety of positions and painted in an expressionistic style—in terms of forms and colors. From this period, it is possible to observe that many of his athletes were somehow connected to water: a stream, a swimming pool, a hose, or the rain.

Invited to exhibit his work in the "City of Lights," Ugarte had the opportunity to observe for several months the water of the Seine River while he prepared his exhibition. The movements and particularly the variations of light generated by this body of water—depending of the time of day and the seasons—became a great revelation to the artist.

It is possible to say that since then, Antonio Ugarte's work oscillates between two interests: on the one hand, there is the work centered on the representation and evaluation of the human figure per se; and, on the other hand, there are his two approaches for representing nature. In the first one, flowers are framed by the natural space and, in the second one, the artists delves into a detailed vision of the flow of water. Nonetheless, both interests share a connection.