PAISAJE CINÉTICO
DAMIÁN SUÁREZ
Works from Cinética series
by Damián Suárez
CURATORIAL TEXT
The nature of Damián Suárez’s (Venezuela, 1988) work necessitates an exploration of kinetic art's origins, from the Impressionist search for the depiction of movement to scientific discoveries about perception and further transformation of movement on canvas into a methodological apparatus of kinetic art. This artistic lineage includes figures such as Manet, Delacroix, Degas (or even earlier - Titian, El Greco), Bauhaus, Robert Delaunay, and Kandinsky, among others. Without a doubt, the list of names that signify the development of kinetic art would not be complete without Latin American artists, such as Gyula Kosice and Julio Le Parc, Jesus Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez.
However, the threaded works of Damián Suárez diverge methodologically from the earlier examples of kinetic art. While certainly drawing on the plastic vocabulary of the Venezuelan School of Abstract Art and particularly on figures like Soto and Cruz-Diez, the relationship of the artist with this vocabulary is far more complex than automatic inheritance. This relationship sprouts from the artist’s experience of growing up in a Venezuelan rural community close to Caracas and further migration, first to the capital and then, following the path of millions of Venezuelans, out of the country.
In his book After the Collapse (2025), Suárez recounts a stark contrast between a green mountain where his native community was nested and a sprouting megapolis of Caracas growing ever wider on the horizon, sucking the country’s oil and human resources. This contrast between modernity and progress on the one hand and tradition and nature on the other later became an integral part of his work, and so did the traditions themselves. Passed orally, in contrast to the academic knowledge, traditions of healing, shamanism, threading, and working with hands became an opposition to the collapsing future the oil resources have promised to the people of Venezuela.
These promises have been tightly linked to the development of the op and kinetic art in the country. Executed with industrial precision, public works of Soto like Esphera Caracas (1997) or Cruz-Diez’s Ambientación de Color Aditivo (1974) were the very language that the country used to broadcast the ideas of national renaissance to its citizens and the world, even when these ideas failed, pushing many, including Suárez himself, into exile.
It was in exile, first in Chile, and then in México where the artistic potential of Damián Suárez began to bloom with thread becoming a centerpoint of the artist’s identity. Fascinated with the tradition of threading widespread in Venezuela, the artist turned thread into his primary medium. In his works, Suárez masterfully exercises what Joseph Albers called "the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect” (the fact that two similar forms will never look the same in different contexts, the appearance of the form is context-dependent). Creating each of the canvases by hand with his own technique, Suárez allows chance and error to enter his creative process.
On the level of experience of the artwork, this creative gesture of breaking a visibly perfect pattern by a random thread develops into a fractal kinetic landscape, ever more complex upon a closer approach. On the conceptual level, however, this gesture becomes a statement. It is an opposition to industrial methods of production, the cleanliness of the earlier kinetic art, and a reference to manual production and tradition. In a performative gesture, Damián Suáres gives agency and voice to the tradition and community that inspired the artist but was largely dismissed in the name of progress after colonization. It is also through this gesture and through almost ritualistic creative process of adding one thread after another that the artist returns the movement sought so passionately by the ones who preceded him to its original meaning in the pictorial space: to fascinate and mesmerize the viewer through the discrepancy between the physicality of his medium and the psychic effect it has.
The works of grand format presented at the Paisaje Cinético exhibition suggest a radical return to the search for evoking the movement. Perhaps it is the use of something as familiar as a textile thread for a medium, perhaps it’s a masterfully hidden complexity of the Suárez’s artistic process, one way or another, the works present the viewer with an opportunity to experience movement in an almost magical way, the way it was experienced by those who saw the first experiments of Impressionists or Kandinsky, or even by those who gazed upon the hand-painted figures at the walls of Altamira or Lascaux as the fire and stories brought those images to life.
Anton Meshkov
De la Serie Cinética, 2025
Damián Suárez
