ORO NEGRO
Centro de Bellas Artes Ateneo de Maracaibo, Venezuela
March 13 – April 9, 2015
"Rolando Peña is part of a daring group of global artists who contribute to the art of contemporary art on time expressing the cultural values of the society in whole. " – Jorge Luis Gutierrez
Reading
Diverse narrative about a persistent interest in the endless question of oil
By Jorge Luis Gutierrez (Museologist/Curator)
The artistic proposal Rolando Peña, presents a narrative, which always points to include social, cultural references and, always linked, collective histories with common experiences elsewhere. Peña is a trans-disciplinary, contemporary artist who has not made formal, expressive and conceptual concessions in more than half a century of career, exhibitions and projects.
His recent artistic proposal "Oro Negro" is essential step in the roadmap of the creative work of Peña. His ability to transform the exhibition space into an area of interaction through videos, fixed and three dimensions, with strategies of concept and form images, seeking to break down barriers between culture and society, through experimental artistic proposals and nontraditional where the artist-viewer interaction becomes more direct, spontaneous, thoughtful and unpredictable.
"Oro Negro" develops as a work where the artist assumes the exhibition space as a neutral container, but a historical building imagined in the context of knowledge. It is the presentation of an artist who believes the universe in which it is immersed (either local or global), from a range of different scientific, philosophical, social and artistic positions integrated into a single proposal.
"Oro Negro", the artist presents his visual strategy, its undisputed metaphor for an encoded in the DNA of our society, oil element. A reflection of how we can finish praising and cursing essential oil product of nature, like a pendulum between happiness and sadness of our contemporary society.
Within this context, the work of Rolando Peña is essential to understanding the transition from late modernism to contemporary society and Latin American art. Rolando Peña is part of a daring group of global artists who contribute to the art of contemporary art (Marcel Duchamp, Meireles, Joseph Buys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joseph Kosuth among others) on time expressing the cultural values of the society in whole.
