For José Caldas (San Cristóbal, Venezuela, 1953) painting has color as the absolute medium to express visual and energetic situations.

After observing the sunset of a landscape in the East of the country and watching the sunrise, the desire was born to externalize the pleasant sensation that he had experienced. He had always liked writing, but he could not capture the essence of what he had felt. He approaches painting by chance, after seeing many artworks hanging on the wall in the house of a valued friend, which left him the restlessness of communicating through the image. This friend was the painter Evelio Giuseppe. He received classes from him, as well as from Alejandro Ríos and Jorge Chacón, locally known artists, who had the wisdom to properly guide his qualities. While Carlos Cruz-Diez and Armando Reverón are considered by him as masters of painting; the first one for the handling of color and the second one, for understanding light as a phenomenological act. Although he began to have a presence in the Venezuelan art scene in the eighties, it was from the nineties that his work began to be recognized.

The work of this artist is an expressionist figuration full of imposing chromaticism. It is worth mentioning that some authors associate his work with Fauvism. Its peculiarity is that the colors are reduced to primary and secondary, with free brushstrokes and pigments applied with a lot of texture, obtaining a high, vibrant and rhythmic contrast on the surface. In natural and urban landscapes, still lifes and house interior scenes, spaces are fragmented through spatial simultaneity to create energetic ‘portals’. The theme of the still life is also frequent, whose allusion to the abundance of food, especially fruit, represents for the artist offerings to the religion that he professes. Caldas maintains that “energy is in constant motion, and this energy is color. (…) This is where my work focuses, on showing the harmonic movement of color, the aura of the landscape.”

Anny Bello