Blanco y negro [White and Black]

A poet, critic, and visual artist, Juan Calzadilla was a cofounder of the Venezuelan literary and artistic group El Techo de la Ballena [The Roof of the Whale] and the journal “Imagen.” A practitioner of the automatic and gestural writing promoted by the group, Calzadilla makes calligraphic drawings that hover between text and image, though he does not attempt to reconcile the two systems. Graphic characters, freed from a single system of logic, twist around each other to blanket the page with an illegible but urgent message. Calzadilla’s dissolution of language into form connects his work with the innovations of Concrete poetry and the move from the written page to phenomenological, performative, and even politicized approaches to art.