ABSTRACT
The painting, if it may be called one, revels in brutal texture, and the viewer becomes witness to a scene of violence as the work forces itself beyond a delimited picture plane into actual space. Informalism becomes the means by which Contramaestre returns painting to a magmatic state, rid of any pretense as a comprehensible system of objects, forms, or even signs. It becomes a tool through which to realize the mission outlined in "El gran magma" the year before: "the painting devoured by its own mat- / ter," now fully incarnated. As a tongue-in-cheek denunciation of Informalism and the entire premise of artistic practice in a politically tumultuous Venezuela, Homenaje a la necrofilia converted the makeshift gallery into an extra-institutional arena of death, the site of a series of bodily destructions that were at once thematically metaphorical and materially literal.
