A mind in motion: Venezuelan artist Pancho Quilici is on a journey to uncover the mechanism of thought

Americas (English Edition), Sept-Oct, 2006 by K. Mitchell Snow

The landscape seems immediately familiar. A few steps to one side or another and we're certain that the view before us will somehow resolve itself and we'll be able to name the place. Wander as we might, the site remains unrecognized--yet the sensation that we already know it never disappears. Art critic Roberto Guevara observed that an encounter with a painting by Venezuelan artist Pancho Quilici was more like traveling than seeing. The vistas that fill the background of a Quilici painting invite exploration. The incomplete buildings, labyrinths, and futuristic, semitransparent geometric forms that dominate their foregrounds encourage it.

This combination of landscape and form gives rise to worlds whose implications extend beyond our own planet. Quilici has invented a term to express the intention of these microcosms of his creation. He calls them "sofogonias," his own combination of the Greek words for the universe and for philosophy.

Pointing to a layer of paint partially hidden by a veil of semitransparent nylon bearing part of a geometric form, Quilici begins a guided tour of one of his creations. Along the bottom of the work, the heavily painted, roughly surfaced section that has yet to assume a recognizable form represents the human subconscious. The landscape embraces the conscious realm, while the geometric forms hovering above it--sometimes inscribed on layers of cloth or plastic that literally float over the surface of the work--exist in the celestial realm of ideas.

His art, he says, seeks to represent the world within, to lend form to such abstract concepts as time. The challenge he has set for himself is to "reveal the mechanism of thought." The tool he has selected for this task is the simple line.

Quilici considers himself a draftsman first. He wryly admits that his paintings are surfaces created specifically so that he can draw on them. Only when he found that the paint was becoming to rough to draw upon did he begin to experiment with the veils of cloth and engraved plastic now common in his work.

Issues of line and form formed part of Quilici's world from his earliest days. He was born into Caracas's arts community in 1954. His mother, Ellen, who had immigrated from Italy following World War II, was an active sculptor and ceramist who taught and directed an artist's workshop. His father, Antoine, an immigrant from Prance, was an architect. Quilici held his first gallery exhibition at age fourteen. He began formal studies at the School of Architecture but soon transferred to Caracas's Institute of Design. Many of the teachers at the institute were internationally recognized artists, including Alirio Palacios and Edgar Sanchez. The faculty also included two Bauhaus-trained instructors who had fled Nazi Germany, Louisa Richter, and Gertrudis Goldschmidt, better known in the art world as Gego.

Quilici's art began attracting critical attention in the late 1970s when, along with Ernesto Leon and other young artists, he helped define what would later be called Venezuelan art's era of "New Drawing." He attributes the renewed interest in drawing to a variety of factors, prime among them being that several generations of artists were working together in search of new directions.

Observing that the artists of his generation are now widely dispersed, both geographically and stylistically, he is hesitant to ascribe any lasting importance to the achievements of the "New Drawing" era. He does recognize, however, that the time is still recalled as a moment of remarkable creative energy.

It also was a time of prosperity for the arts in Venezuela. Oil money enriched a number of institutions. Sensing a renewed interest in the medium, Caracas's Foundation of Art and Culture (FUNDARTE), initiated its National Drawing Biennial, with Quilici as a prize-winning participant. He began receiving other honors and awards shortly after his graduation front the Institute of Design. In 1980, with a scholarship granted by the Ministry of Culture, Quilici traveled to Paris, where he established a studio.

At the time, Quilici's energetically drawn work often included the human form--an element that is almost entirely missing front his more recent creations. His approach to the figure ranged from the abstract to the highly realistic, but the artist's interest in landscape and geometric form provided an underlying theme uniting these different approaches in a distinctive body of work.

During his first years in Paris, Quilici began to paint. This change in his visual vocabulary was not only a change in medium, it also marked a new direction in his choice of subjects. Landscapes, which he had first employed as relatively minor background elements, began to dominate the visual space. The human figure vanished, but signs of humanity remained.

Like many of the nineteenth-century artists from the Americas who had studied in Europe before him, Quilici turned to the remains of classical civilization for inspiration. Inventing his archaeology as he worked, the artist filled the foreground of his canvases with images of crumbling walls, broken pillars, and ruined amphitheaters that were hybrids of Greek, Roman, and Mesoamerican buildings. Although only elements of their architecture and a few fragmentary artifacts survived as silent witnesses, it was clear that the prior residents of these abandoned places had lived on an epic scale.