Born in Madrid, Spain (1951) Carlos Blanco moved with his parents to Venezuela at an early age. His vocation towards art led him to be interested in painting and dramaturgy. In 1968 he studied at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, in Caracas, prior to other approaches to cartoons and classical painting. In 1970 he held a scenography workshop at the Teatro Municipal de Caracas, and the following year he obtained a scholarship awarded by the Ateneo de Caracas, to study Dramatic Art, mention Scenography, at the Instituto de Teatro de la Universidad de Chile. In this way, guided by the restless spirit of youth, he traveled through several Latin American countries, including Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, always with painting as an activity present in his life dynamics.

Back in Venezuela in 1973, he settled in the mountains of Mucuchíes, Mérida state. He remained active in the exhibition circuit, and in 1986 he had his first individual exhibition entitled “Kaleidoscopio”, receiving the best appreciations from the critics. This exhibition is emblematic of Carlos Blanco’s personal style that continues to this day.

Carlos Blanco is an excellent portraitist. Added to this quality of his technique is the relationship between figuration and abstraction that emanates from the author’s imagination to turn everyday moments into events with a significant artistic charge. Settling in Asturias for several years, he has taken from Spanish culture, the figures of the dancers as a reason for study. In this recent work, the artist manages to cross elements of difficult visual dialogue, such as figuration and an abstraction that tends towards geometrization, a relationship that makes it more complex by incorporating ‘time’. The artist challenges the instantaneousness of time, capturing the moment with brushstrokes of strong musicality. For this reason, their figures are unusual in their perspectives, their forms are flashes of moving crystals, color and light. His style is unclassifiable, in our opinion, we would link it with an expressionist figuration, crossed by an abstract representation, sometimes free, sometimes geometric.

Anny Bello