Curated by Rafael Castillo Zapata, Sala Mendoza + Henrique Faria Fine Art, Caracas, Venezuela
When a work of art is radically involved in an immediate political context, it is, at once, subject to the relentless drifts of historical contingency and to the leaps and shocks shown by the social events it is in a permanent dialog with. Work such as the one Michelena shows in Elíptico, developed from a conceptualist platform where purity of shape is severely concerned by the current political situation in Venezuela and under the umbrella of the sour consequences of the 2014 conflict on the nation’s democratic mood, is likely to be affected in different ways ways in its formal and ideological consistency by the possible changes that started to be seen in this regard with the outcome of last year’s parliamentary elections.
When the horizon of possibilities to revert the current political situation in Venezuela seemed very distant, a good number of the pieces exhibited in Elíptico maintained a critical dialogue with that situation in a way that invited the audience to learn about it and question it through subtle references and allusions. now that this horizon looks less distant and impracticable, it is logical to think that such set of pieces–alluding to the institutional helplessness of the nation, the seizure and distortion of the republican constitutional text, to mention but two very relevant pieces within his complex production–openly imposes o demands a new reading, an interpretation which is, at least, relativized.