Identities in transit:
Raising one's glance beyond the VI Salón Cantv as a showcase for young contemporary artists via a specific curatorial proposal, there is a plastic horizon the extent and heterogeneity of which — as with all contemporary artistic manifestations — is difficult to express in trends.

Here, the independent curator Miguel Miguel restates the difficulty of finding groups of subjects in common. The traditional notion of trend, represented by the majority of Venezuelan film makers and those with a special interest in the organization of plans and expression of volume utilizing industrial age materials (‘constructivistasí­), from 1950 to 1970, begins to weaken from the eighties onwards. The following decade, characterized by the appearance of multiple languages, leaves the continuity of common codes behind and gives way to individual discussions based on personal judgment and assimilated in other contexts, which are constantly re-forming on the basis of personal subjectivity.

"In the midst of a globalization project facing a "complex connectivity" project, a train of thought taken by the independent curator Jesús Fuenmayor to place in position "the fragile attempts at cohesion" in the concept of the "Venezuelan artist" and its relationship with a context, notes a "certain preoccupation on the part of the artists for production conditions and the manner of presenting the work". However, above what Fuenmayor indicates as the possibility of "a cultural translation", there is an authority given to the person whom conditions the reading.

Within a broad and varied spectrum which surpasses the attempts to present a detailed description of Venezuelan art, artists such as Meyer Vaisman, Antonieta Sosa, José Gabriel Fernández, Sammy Cucher, Arturo Herrera, Alfred Wenemoser, Alí­ González, Sigfredo Chacón, Alexander Gerdel, Roberto Obregón, Héctor Fuenmayor, Eugenio Espinoza, Carla Arocha, Javier Téllez and José Antonio Hernández-Diez stand out among an extensive and heterogeneous group.

Some of these artists live and work abroad, an aspect which, although one cannot consider it a unifying element, conditions an analysis of the relationship with a cultural and personal context. Cases such as, for example, the work of José Antonio Hernández—Diez, who currently lives in Barcelona and has just presented a retrospective at New Yorkí­s New Museum, cannot be appreciated without taking into consideration a personal subjectiveness. Hernández-Diez has dealt with subjects such as religion, personal daily life, social problems and Venezuelan politics or the appropriation of the elements of the garb of mass culture presented in self-contradiction, aspects appearing in his photographic series (from the year 2000) of enormous rubber shoes — with titles such as Kant, Hume, Jung, Marx y Hegel (16), where the artist takes this globalized space capable of mixing in its cultural diet the element unifying the brand with the intellectual postulates of Western philosophy, mimicked in the banal and the everyday.

All attempts at totality would contradict the essence of the contemporary. However, Venezuelan artists, both those working in the country and those who carry out their work abroad, prepare a plastic universe where the image of a point of reference is inevitably transfixed by the context in which it grew and the elements of cultural interchange in conforming an aesthetic experience, which determines constantly the changing proposals from the only space possible: that of the artist.