Within the panorama of Latin American painting, and from the perspective of its evolution, the figure of Armando Reverón (1889-1954) is indisputably outstanding, although this has been acknowledged only somewhat belatedly.
By 1920, Armando Reverón had reached a prodigious and unbounded productivity giving rise to a period of artistic maturity. Nestled between the early experimentations of 1919 and the ethereal landscapes of 1924, Figura bajo un uvero embodies the mastery of Reverón’s most irrefutably personal “Blue period.” Bathed in mysterious shades of deep and iridescent blues, these are intensely atmospheric paintings, simultaneously lyrical and fiercely modern. Together, this small group of extremely rare canvases—less than fifteen landscapes were accounted for by Juan Calzadilla in his landmark 1979 book: Armando Reverón: sus obras—epitomize the artist’s transition into the realm of “the modern.”
The eminent Venezuelan art historian Alfredo Boulton divides Reverón's work into three distinct periods: Blue (1919-1924), White (1924-1934) and Sepia (1935-1954), dominated and differentiated not only by pigment, but also by stylistic and technical changes. According to Boulton: "of the three periods characterizing Reverón's painting, the Blue period was the shortest and reached its best expression in the paintings made between 1919 and 1920."
Characterized by agitated impressionist brushstrokes rich in impasto, Reverón’s “Blue period” synthesizes late nineteenth century European influences ranging from symbolism and pointillism, to the great Spanish masters: Goya, Velázquez and Zuloaga whose lessons were assimilated by the young artist during his t.mes in Madrid and Barcelona in 1911. On a scholarship, a 23-year-old Reverón moved to the Spanish capital and studied under the direction of several academic painters. As many Latin American artists of his generation, he visited El Prado Museum assiduously; he was particularly attracted to Goya's The Nude Maja, painted circa 1798, still a revolutionary painting more than one-hundred years after its creation. He briefly traveled to nearby Segovia to study with the painter Ignacio Zuloaga, second only to Joaquín Sorolla in his depictions of traditional Spanish genre scenes. Reverón would maintain his interest in all things Spanish for the rest of his life and themes such as Goyaesque reclining nudes and women with Spanish fans and shawls would appear throughout his career—as evidenced by a related, sepia-period nude in the collects ion of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Figura bajo un uvero is a masterpiece from this seminal formative period. Bathed with a cool crepuscular light, the viewer confronts a lone female nude seated on the branch of a majestic sea grape tree—in Spanish, uvero—a particular species that grows close to the water throughout the American tropics. Meeting the viewer's gaze, she appears unaffected by her nudity; she openly welcomes the stranger who wanders into her whimsical world. Accompanied by a small black dog on her lap and a cobalt blue parasol, our sitter retains the viewer’s undivided attention while the sound of crushing waves quickly dissolves into foam on the white beaches of Macuto, a seaside village where Reverón and his girlfriend, Juanita Mota would finally settle in 1922. Here they eventually built their now-mythological oceanside studio and home, known as El Castillete (The Little Castle).
By moving to Macuto, Reverón disengaged himself from the prevailing social and cultural forces of Latin America. He severed ties with the Catholic Church, escaped the prejudices and decorum of a class system perpetuated since colonial t.mes s and removed himself from political struggles and even artistic influences. But his break was motivated by more than discontent: “Like the flights of Gauguin and Rimbaud from industrial Europe, it was a profound rejection of Western civilization’s values of materialism and power” (Holliday T. Day & Hollister Sturge, in Exh. Cat., Art of the Fantastic, Latin America 1920-1987, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1987, p.44).
La Cueva (The Cave), another exquisite canvas from 1920 is a resounding example from Reverón’s “Blue period” in beautiful dialogue with Figura bajo un uvero. Sharing an atmosphere enchantment and Goyaesque evocation, both canvases are executed in a similar technique and painted with shimmering blue inks. The result is a lusciously iridescent surface saturated with rich glazes. Although related, Figura bajo un uvero dissolves into a dreamlike vision of an ethereal seascape—an otherworldly scene perfectly adapted to the local context of the Caribbean.
Like in La Cueva, blue tonalities prevail in Figura bajo un uvero. In the present work darkness gives way to the luminosity of the outdoors. The rich surface is built up by hundreds of separate daubs of color applied in the impressionist manner. In the expansive foreground, complementary oranges and blues, superimposed upon one another, indicate a knowledge of divisionist principles. “But Reverón is neither a naturalist attempting to record the site before him nor a theoretician employing a methodical system for the sake of color harmony. He adopts these techniques in pursuit of a poetic, even dreamlike, vision. The rich texture of paint and the vibration of hue create a shimmering surface, iridescent, bejeweled, and magical. His seaside landscape become a lyrical reverie, a fantasy in movement and coloration” (ibid., p. 45).
“The best way to look at Reverón’s work, without rhetorical flourish, is to coldly analyze the different concepts it comprises. One of its most characteristic components is the very stroke with which the work is created: its impasto, the brushstroke, its graphic character, its vigor, the linear arabesque, its form and its artistic strength. The strokes expressiveness always had as much emotional impact as their color.”