Julio Pacheco
Julio Pacheco
Painter and sculptor. Son of Julio Pacheco and Ilia Rivas. He is a renowned Venezuelan artist. With more than four decades of uninterrupted career, he has been developing since his beginnings as a painter a distinctive and unique language around the theme of space and perspective, which has placed him prominently in the contemporary art of Venezuela. Born in Caracas in 1953, Julio Pacheco Rivas obtains high recognition from an early age that assured him a position of first level in the Venezuelan plastic arts of the XX century and that has consolidated with notoriety in this first decade of the present century. In 1976, when he was barely 23 years old, he was awarded the Arturo Michelena Prize, being the youngest artist to receive it and never before obtained by another younger artist to the present. A year later he travels to Paris where he resides, works and exhibits individually and collectively for many years, both in the French capital and in other important cities in Europe.
In 1977, together with José Campos Biscardi, he represents Venezuela in the X Biennial of Young Artists of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris with Project for social club of antineoplasticists and is part of the collective "Eleven types" (Sala Mendoza) and "Current Art of Latin America" in Madrid. From 1977 to 1987 he settled in Paris, although his trips to Venezuela were frequent. In 1978 he participated in "Art-9/78" (Basel, Switzerland), "The Artist Market Association Gallery" (London), the Salon de Mayo (Paris), the International Contemporary Art Exhibition (Monaco) and the Salon de Toulon -Draguignan (France). In 1979 he was part of the collective "Grands et jeunes d'aujourd'hui" at the Grand Palais in Paris and exhibited at the Galeries des Éditions Le Musée de Poche and at the Unité Pédagogique d'Architecture (Nantes, France). In 1980, he won the jury prize at the 13th International Contemporary Art Prize of Monaco and he appears in the Salon de Montrouge (France). In the same year, he exhibited 21 paintings in acrylic on canvas and a stained glass window designed by the artist and produced by Marie-Françoise and Ives Cothouit, all made in Paris between 1977 and 1979 (Galería Estudio Actual, Caracas). According to Roberto Montero Castro, the work presented in this exhibition provides different clues for the apprehension of his painting: "the first key is the unreality of the spaces [...] in our artist perspective serves to demonstrate the fiction of that virtual space. The second key is in the mirages, many of these paintings have been proposed as mirror images of real areas in which the painting would supposedly be placed as a mirror [...] The third key is the structure of the space. of unreality by impulse of his metaphor of the world, Pacheco Rivas follows the laws of a congenital symmetry [...] The fourth key is time: the alterations of the symmetry, the changes of the pictorial surface ordered according to a sequence, the movement of the objects, are the visual data that Pacheco Rivas offers to introduce the time dimension in his images "(1980).
In 1987 he returned to Venezuela and in 1988 he appeared in four collectives: in the "União Latina" (Lisbon), in the Euro-American Art Center (Caracas), in the MACC and in the 1st National Exhibition of Plastic Arts, where he obtained the first prize with Compendium (polyptych, 210 x 850 cm), "a kind of summary of all his work, which must be read by the viewer, step by step, from left to right, in which he takes up key moments of some of his previous works and rethinks them in a different context "(Peruga, 1989). In 1989, with Alharaca vespertina (dated from 1984) it is included in "Two decades of the landscape in the collection of the National Art Gallery" and in December of this year inaugurates in the MBA the exhibition "Una ciudad", later mounted in the Venezuelan pavilion at the XLIV Venice Biennial (1990). Three large paintings and three sculptures make up the series, accompanied by a set of architectural furniture designed by the artist. In 1992, together with Juan Iribarren, he exhibited "Two artists at the reach of the landscape" in the Clave Gallery (Caracas), in which he exhibited two diptychs facing each other, proposing, according to Luis Ángel Duque, "new views of the immense imaginary hemicycle with a plastic result that looks like Renaissance sketches by Francesco de Giorgio or Piero de la Francesca "(1992). In 1994, on Avenida Francisco Fajardo east-west, Mira de Altamar was installed, a large iron figure on an urban scale that symbolizes a ship within the sea, donated by the Chacao Cultural Foundation to the Chacao municipality. The plastic work of Pacheco Rivas proposes from the painting a geometrical vision of the landscape: the reason of the Renaissance or cybernetic perspective constitutes an instrument that allows both the ordering of a hybrid thought and the fixing of a utopian or possible landscape. His inventions recall the baroque perspective games of a Wentzel Jamnitzer for whom the world was reduced to the perfection of regular bodies.