|
 Presentation
In the superficial surveys appeared in
newspapers and magazines on which who was the most important figure of the last
millennium, I have stated, with astonishment, that Guttenberg is never mentioned, even
though he took the more amazing individual History's step when he transformed and
popularised the art of writing. To write was no longer never the same thing before the
brilliant German because, among other things, the author already knows that has
potentially and a infinitely quantity of readers; he no longer writes for the reduced
groups of a court or of the monasteries, but rather points to a lectural universe
conformed by successive generations of critics that will be called to be judges of the
quality and interest of the written message.
Taken by similar considerations to those, I remembered that some years ago, in the Museum
of Contemporary Art of Caracas, a called exhibition was made, indeed,
"Scripture", with images of Jesus Soto and texts of Arturo Uslar Pietri. I
thought that so lucky coincidence of talents and wills would have, in some way, to repeat
itself, but not in something so ephemeral and finite, like an exhibition, but in the
lasting and capable testimony of multiple repetitions as a book.
I was animated for that reason to be the promoter and publisher of the present volume. My
friend Carlos Silva, Philosopher and Historian of Art, devoted himself to write up an
extensive, playful and erudite text, specially prepared for the occasion: "Soto and
the Scripture". The reader will be able to appreciate how Silva puts to the service
of the enlightening word the work of Soto - our more universally and recognized artist
-his sharpness in the analysis and the analogies, where the Christian voice of San Juan,
"the evangelists poet" indicates to us that The Verb was in the beginning and
The Verb was God. And from there, the Verb, the word, the history of the human's
redemption is derived and the sacred writing then will become profane and sublime in
Soto's work.
 But it is certain that I lacked something essential,
the collaboration of the two authors of that happy exhibition, Jesus Soto and Arturo Uslar
Pietri. From the Artist I obtained a perspicaciously and testimonial essay, and all the
photographic material of his best work, related, with his magnificent writing.
The illustrated contribution of Arturo Uslar Pietri was fluid and total of that humanism
and bonhomie on which our main writer of the XX century makes finery. As well as Don
Arturo turns into wisdom and beauty what he touches - novel, essay, biography and their
always waited televising dissertations on diverse topics -, therefore, he makes this way
now when allowing the inclusion, in this book, of two of his texts about Soto, and two
poems, both texts, although are not unpublished, will not be able to be easily found, even
in the most complete bibliographies about the author.
It is certain that if the word belongs to all the humanity, the authentic writing ("
authentic " means what is sustained by itself), is only a thing of cultured men, and
not of all, hardly, of some that have the gift of being remitted to the origins, to the
sacred writing, from where they obtain the nominative power which the man settles in the
cosmos and builds worlds. For that reason, Arturo Uslar Pietri begins with what is known
from the reader, to surround him in an articulate ascension of the language, able to
clarify the work of Jesus Soto, not through, but in the word, in these tissues of
significant and meanings, in the scriptural symmetry and analogy that gives space to
masterful essays and demonstrates with clarity and eloquence that Dr. Arturo is an
excellent critic of art.
The talent and the reflect of the time have given the rule so the best of Venezuela -the
arts and the writing- have taken the compass of the universal thing, which doesn't have
any other borders but the human intelligence. Soto and Uslar Pietri are the two most
recognized Venezuelans, each one in their scriptural field, the outside more. And with all
justice, because the first one doesn't only leave behind the end of the modernity in the
XX century, inaugurated by painters as Mondrian, but rather he takes one step beyond the
future and penetrates in the second half of the last century, and he still has and will
have unavoidable validity in the future. How much has not he enriched the plastic arts,
erasing the generic distinction between painting and sculpture, between the aura of the
bi-dimensional thing and the stereometry of the three-dimensional work. How much has not
he influenced not only in other artists of his generation and the following ones, but
mainly in the re-accommodating of our capacity to perceive the visible phenomenons of our
cultural and natural environment.
As Oscar Wilde pointed out, we end up
appreciating the nature throughout the view and the understanding of a quality's art of
work, in this urban cosmos that besieges us and that takes us away from our remote rural
origin. In a country where the first thing that they should do is not allow to be
dominated for the devouring tropical nature and the civilizating absence of the rhythm of
the four seasons, Soto rescues us from that danger introducing a mental order that is
apprehended by means of the senses and so he goes pushing, with its creations, the
itinerary of our residences and in the city, encouraging it and humanizing it, because he
leaves in it a changing nuclei of the best art.
So far has reached the distribution of
Soto´s work in Venezuela and besides, that the artist could say, as Crates of Thebe
glimpsed it, in the antiquity: "I do not have a City that retains me, but the entire
world to live my life".
Another point would suit to Uslar Pietri´s
illuminated word, to its lucid advanced age, he still surprises us perhaps with his best
novel, "The Visit in the Time", award-winning internationally and he leaves
fertile space to gloss and to discover the veil, already classic of Soto.
When joining, then, this Trinity of talents so dissimilar, Soto, Uslar and Silva, guided
towards the good cause of the art of the writing -which tends to become lost in the post
modernity- I feel as a publisher that throughout this initiative, I am surrendering a
homage to the initial clay tablets, in the remote Mesopotamian culture, where for the
first time in the humanity's history, they appeared, united the word and the geometric
sign, and that differentiated for always the man with the writing, of the fleeting
transience of the nature. Since then, everything is a symbol.
Ninoska Huerta G.
Editora.
|
|
