Caracas Cenital #1 Painting

Marian Ichaso Lefeld is a Venezuelan artist living and working in Dallas for more than two decades. Her work involves mixed media processes and images related to the Modernist architecture of Caracas. Through color she layers the geographical and political landscape of Venezuela onto her paintings, creating ethereal visual representations of a deeply complex nation. She holds a BA and MFA degrees from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and has shown her work in Dallas, Caracas, Amsterdam, and Buenos Aires. Marian Ichaso Lefeld is also a full-time instructor in the art department at Dallas College, teaching painting, art appreciation, and art history. The exhibition Marian Ichaso Lefeld: Tierra de Gracia on view at Latino Cultural Center in Dallas is the artist’s first major exhibition, presenting recent works produced in 2020 and 2021. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Working primarily in oil painting, my gaze is directed back to Venezuela, my beloved country of origin. My work reflects its psychological and literal landscapes of extremes. I am drawn to the high density of Caracas, the capital city, which sits extemporaneously over an intricate geographical valley. My family moved there, from a bucolic coastal town in 1983, the same year of the inaugural run of the city’s subway system. As a wayward teen, I frequently skipped school, spending my days riding the Metro and wandering through Caracas’ labyrinth of downtown streets. In the city’s chaos, I found great beauty. The modernist buildings held so much promise and hope, such strength, and progress. The memories of those days and my discoveries of the imposing landscape left an indelible imprint on my psyche. Decades later, from a migrant’s perspective, I grapple with how the political/revolutionary experiment taking place in Venezuela over the past twenty years can be presented as socialism and the redistribution of wealth. The reality is closer to a profound polarization and the creation of a narco-state. Sadly, my country is a failed nation. Color plays a vital role in my work. The light in Venezuela is intensely brighter than that of the Northern Hemisphere. My paintings incorporate the prominent Modernist architecture of Caracas. Some of these structures are still standing, others serve as dilapidated, stubborn witnesses of a time before the revolution. A time before I left... before destruction and near obliteration.