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Belgica Rodriguez
Director, The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America
The work of Carlos Chavez reflects in many ways his attraction toward the fantastic. But as in the work of many other Latin
American artists, his approach to visual problems is not based on fantasy itself but in using his own imagination to capture
the essence of life through a vivid transformation of personal experience. Despite the modernist character of his painting,
Chavez's works state that Peruvian painting is not a discipline without a tradition. We must then "read" painting,
not only look at it, to discover the hidden emotional charges and symbolisms which differentiate the Iberoamerican culture
from other expressions in the Western Hemisphere. Only in this way will we begin to understand that there is more than one
direction leading to a valid interpretation of the contemporary history of art.
Tram Combs, Woodstock Times, Saugerties, New York
"Chavez is primarily a painter, but his work is graphic, based on line, as is almost all Latin American art of all historical
periods. He shares a sort of iconic or emblematic presentation of motif common to many painters of the Andean region. His
color is sweet, pastellish with a few stronger hues; he is a sensitive colorist, especially responsive to the family of reds.
His picture surface is basically flat, like a good modernist's, but there is a suggestion of perspective, and he alludes to
volume by moderating chroma......Chavez's seriously whimsical creations suggest hybrids of man, animal and machine. As dream,
desire and art, they are convincingly authentic."
By Florencio Garcia-Cisneros Member of the International Association of art Critics. New York
Carlos Chavez was first known in the United States of America as has occurred to many other today's well known artists-with
an individual exposition sponsored by the OEA, at the "Art Museum of the Americas" in Washington, D.C.
Carlos Chavez has created his plastic message with such an energic and imaginative strength that it can be said that he
is a painter that offers something .new in the plastic style, different from the rest of the new generations of Latin-American
artists. Tram Combs, the renowned art critic, wrote a praising review for the first presentation of Chavez's work in the United
States of America entitled "Star War without War", which let a magnificent entry to Chavez singular world of art.
It must be said that Carlos Chavez develops with his very personal style, a plastic expression in which his automobiles'
parts give themselves a specific "Pop-surrealistic" art, standing alone in a personal "world apart".
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