Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, October 26, 2022: Francisco Narváez, a Venezuelan sculptor, plastic artist (#1683)

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Artist of the Day, October 26, 2022: Francisco Narváez, a Venezuelan sculptor, plastic artist (#1683)

Francisco José Narváez OL (1905 -1982), was a Venezuelan plastic artist, one of the most important sculptors of his country, creator among many other works of the well-known sculptural group "Las Toninas", which adorns the fountain of Plaza O'Leary in Caracas.

Narváez, the son of a cabinetmaker and restorer named José Lorenzo Narváez and Vicenta Emilia Rivera, moved to Caracas as a teenager, where he began studying at the Caracas Academy of Fine Arts. In 1928 he sailed for Paris, where he would attend the Julian Academy and establish links with the Montparnasse movement, from which Modigliani, Raoul Dufy and Moisés Kisling strongly influenced him.

Narváez returned to Venezuela in 1931, and a few years later he began to work with the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, who used to ask the neo-Spartan sculptor for pieces for the architectural works he undertook. That is why Narváez's sculptural work can be seen in the Parque Carabobo fountain, in the reliefs on the facades of the Museums of Fine Arts and Natural Sciences, and the group of pieces for the fountain in Plaza O'Leary, in El Silencio, known as “Las Toninas”; all of them in the city of Caracas.

In 1939, he traveled to New York City in order to decorate the Venezuelan pavilion at the World's Fair that was held that year in the US metropolis and exhibited the works Café y Frutas (currently at the Andrés Bello Lyceum in Caracas) and Pearls and Cocoa (at the Liceo Fermín Toro in Caracas).

In 1949 he married Lobelia Benítez Lugo and in December of that year his first daughter, Carolina, was born. He also makes a statue of "Fermín Toro"; sculpture in Cumarebo stone carved to the point, located in the internal courtyards of the Liceo Fermín Toro, in Caracas.

In 1952 he carried out the equestrian statue of General Rafael Urdaneta, Venezuelan president, located in Caracas in the central Plaza La Candelaria. Later he would collaborate with Villanueva executing several pieces for the University City of Caracas, which the famous architect conceived as a "synthesis of the Arts". Education, Science, The Athlete, the fresco in the University Chapel, the bust of José María Vargas and Culture, these last two in the rectory square, are some of his works located on the campus of the Central University of Venezuela. .

In 1981 and 1982, he would make sculptural pieces of monumental dimensions; one of them, Gran Volumen, was made for the Amuay Refining Complex, and the second, one of the last pieces he would make, the Harmony of Volumes and Space, for the Caracas Metro, located in Plaza Francisco Narváez a the exit of the Metro Station of La Hoyada.

Narváez's work is characterized by a strong ethnic component, expressed in his own language with Negroid and indigenous reminiscences, in which the volumes have the voluptuousness and cadence of the tropics. Despite his academic artistic training and his contact with European art, Narváez never imitated foreign models, but instead emphasized the use of materials typical of the country, such as Cumarebo and Araya stones and native woods; This makes his sculpture a profoundly Venezuelan artistic fact, integrating the cultures that intermingle in the country, and with a great sense of rootedness.

After his death, the Francisco Narváez Foundation was created in 1985, whose headquarters are on the same site as the last workshop on San Martín Avenue, which is preserved in perfect condition and where the Francisco Narváez Caracas Museum now operates.

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