Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 St.;
(212) 708-9400. Through April 16
SOME of the oddest ducks in the history of modern art were not really so odd, but pretended to be in order to further their careers. But few painters who achieved any prominence were as sincerely and effortlessly odd as the Venezuelan artist Armando Reveron, the subject of a new retrospective at MoMA. He couldn’t help it – he was a schizophrenic.
In 1921, in his early 30s, this son of a prominent family moved to Macuto, a small village on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, where he built for himself a stone compound, a mini-fortress in which he spent the rest of his life until his death in 1954.
He was most fortunate to share this dominion with his wife, Juanita Rios, as well as a number of life-sized dolls that he used as models for his paintings and that he engaged in convivial conversation.
His works consists mostly of landscapes and figure paintings which, it must be said, don’t look extremely odd. His preference for pale pigment on pale pigment was an option among the Modernists since the Symbolist movement of the 1890s, which clearly inspired the dreamy, soft-focus mood that dominates his work.
But given the washed-out, thickly painted form he gives his visions, it begins to appear that something else is at work here. He seems to see the world itself as a conceptual, emotional and visual blur, with all its firm boundaries collapsed into an anarchic mess. Through this world he moved for half a century like a blind man, but one given to rare moments of almost hallucinatory lucidity.