Carlos Poveda is a Latin American artist currently living in Paris, France. He became known through his figurative drawings, described by critics as "expressionist", early during the sixties when he had several one man shows throughout the American Continent, where he obtained important prizes at the VIII Sao Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil, and in Costa Rica, his country of birth, where he was awarded a National Prize for painting. As an artist always interested in pictorial research, during the seventies he overstepped his well known world, and from paper he went on to explore the possibilities of canvas doing imaginary landscapes, extremely sparse but rich in textures, a species of collage and construction that would lead him to tridimensionality a few years later, when the supports became woods and plastics. Early in the nineties, Poveda created "wall sculptures" of vegetation and trees he extracted from his paintings, with materials such as aluminum, wood and polyethylene that were installed both in public and private sites in Caracas. As he developed his research, the artist proposed another theme circa 1995, it was the idea of "still lives" that lead to the works seen here. In 1998, the "Museo Jacobo Borges" in Caracas exhibited a wide sampling of these sculptures, under the name of "Domestic Landscapes", where Poveda clearly shows the alchemistic versatility in the use of materials on "ready made" supports, in an act of hazardous composition that seems to answer to a mimetic reprisal of nature in which reality and fiction become an abstract sculptural object. Venezuelan critic and researcher Jesus Fuenmayor says: (these works) "are not iconic images, notwithstanding their figurative vocation, yet we implicitly understand them as food, since they are seen so by an effort of the viewers imagination, they are objects recognizable from the culture of gastronomy. They are instead, like layers, structural stains that are attained, if we must analyze them in an isolated mien, a merely aesthetic, artistic exercise". Throughout time, the table has been a source of inspiration for artists; it is worth remembering the Pompeii frescoes, Chardins paintings, Vermeers tables or the Dutch Masters of the XVII and XVIII centuries, to launch into the iconography of Pop Art. Today isolated artists continue developing this line of work in their own manner. Carlos Poveda shows with these "Domestic Landscapes" a very contemporary artistic proposal. His "still life" strongly states the idea that these works, considered traditionally as "minor" obtain with Poveda a status of "major". |