Francisco Salazar
Venezuelan, 1937–2019
The obsession for pure visuality is a field and a passion that governs all the plastic production of Francisco Salazar, a Venezuelan resident in Paris for several decades. His pictorial journey has not changed despite the mark of time: recurrently, he has recourse to a white area, stripped, subtle, worried, almost in relief. In cardboard or canvas, this plan is altered, either by a discreet movement, emotional, enveloping and each time more important, either by the displacement of light and geometric forms; ideas of lines, of short squares, in rhythmic and serial progression, oriented indistinctly in one direction or another. Thus, the artist generates meanings that highlight the plastic values he synthesizes from supremacist and minimalist sources.
The geometrical aspects suggested by Salazar are perceptible in a minimal visuality: the white lines on the white plane appear to rise intermittently thanks to the tiny gleams and the vibrations that they project. This allows to appreciate their structural relations, their dimensional concepts, their contrasts of forms, their tones, their treatments figure-funds, their very delicate spatial graph, their luminous degrees and their immateriality among other presences.
Salazar worked with a single color, although he sought some nuances to the monochrome of white. It is from here and in front of the sentence of this creator, that the critic Roberto Guevara affirms: "The eye attends an incessant playful displacement: pure white on pure white and shadows". White reaffirms the values of supremacism and minimalism, from which the sources of all his work develop. In the course of his experience, the artist has made the deployment, the break, the unfolding, the extension of a geometric element real within his formal unit.
Submitted by Espace Meyer Zafra


