The Pavilion You Have to Walk Past: Juvenal Ravelo in Venice

ART & CULTURE · VENICE

Reading time: 8 min

The Venezuela Pavilion at Biennale Arte 2024 gave its ninetieth year to Juvenal Ravelo, a kinetic artist who has spent seven decades making work that does not hold still. Stand square to his screens and they read as a flat chevron pattern. Step to one side and they resolve into something else entirely. The work is not the object. The work is the walking.

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Venezuela showed Juvenal Ravelo at the 60th International Art Exhibition in 2024, under the title Participatory Experience, in the country’s pavilion in the Giardini. The exhibition was curated by Edgar Ernesto Gonzalez, with Reinaldo J. Landaeta Diaz as commissioner, and it was assembled as a survey of more than seventy years of practice.

Ravelo works with what he calls the fragmentation of light. The pieces are built from assembled acrylics, aluminium and reflective glass, cut into narrow vertical elements and set proud of a backing plane, each face carrying its own band of colour. Outside the pavilion, in the open air, the principle was built at the scale of a wall.

That outdoor screen is the clearest possible demonstration of what the work does, and it is almost impossible to photograph honestly. Face it straight on and it presents as a flat surface of chevrons in blocked colour: reds and pinks at one end, running through violet, blue and green, out to yellow and orange. Move six feet along it and the chevrons disappear. What is actually there is a row of upright fins, each painted on more than one face, and the pattern you saw a moment ago was only the sum of the faces you could see from where you were standing.

The work does not exist in a photograph

This is the useful thing about Ravelo’s method, and it is a genuine design problem rather than a trick.

Colour in a painting is fixed. The artist puts it down, and it stays where it is put, whatever the viewer does. Colour in Ravelo’s screens is assembled in the eye, from fragments distributed across surfaces that face different directions. Walk left and the leading faces of every fin come into view while the trailing faces disappear behind them. Walk right and the exchange reverses. The wall does not change. The proportion of it available to you does, continuously, and the colour recomposes at every step.

The physical construction is straightforward and rigorous. Narrow strips, machined to a consistent depth, fixed at a regular interval, each carrying flat bands of unmodulated colour. There is no gradient anywhere in the work, and no blending. Every transition a viewer perceives is produced by the geometry of the assembly and the position of their own body, which is why the surfaces have to be exact. A fin set a few millimetres out of line would collapse the effect across the whole panel.

It also explains why so much kinetic art of this generation reproduces so badly. A single image can only ever record one position, and the piece is defined by the relationship between positions.

Paris in 1964, and the other half of the training

Ravelo was born in 1934 in Caripito, in the state of Monagas in eastern Venezuela, and he went to France in 1964. That is the standard biography of a Venezuelan artist of his generation, and it is where the standard version usually stops.

What he went to study is the part worth keeping. He went to Paris to work on the principles of Kineticism and Constructivism, and on the sociology of art. Those two things together, in one sentence, explain the entire career.

The first half is visible in every screen he has made since: optics, geometry, the exact behaviour of colour under a moving eye. The second half is the reason the work has never stayed in a gallery. He stayed in Paris for more than three decades, keeping a connection to Venezuela throughout, and what came back with him was not only a technique but a question about who the technique was for.

The museum in Caripito

The answer to that question is in his home town.

Ravelo founded an open-air museum in Caripito, taking his Módulos Cromáticos out into the streets of the place he was born and building them with the people who live there. Community members are not the audience for those works. They are the people who make them, applying the colour themselves under the artist’s system.

Set that beside the pavilion title and Participatory Experience stops being a piece of exhibition-speak and becomes an accurate description of two different things at once. There is the optical participation, in which the viewer’s movement completes the work and nobody sees quite the same wall. And there is the social participation, in which the work is fabricated by the community whose street it will stand in. The same word covers both, and in Ravelo’s practice they are the same idea arriving at different scales. A work that only exists through the involvement of the person in front of it is not a large step from a work that only exists through the involvement of the town it is made in.

He received Venezuela’s National Culture Prize in Plastic Arts in 2008. The pavilion in 2024 arrived in his ninetieth year.

Where a generation learned to put art on buildings

There is a reason Venezuela produced so much of the twentieth century’s kinetic art, and it is architectural.

Between 1940 and 1960, Carlos Raúl Villanueva designed and built the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, a campus conceived around what became known as the synthesis of the arts: painting, sculpture and building developed together rather than one applied to another once the structure was finished. Alexander Calder made Clouds for the Aula Magna, a set of suspended forms that are an acoustic instrument as much as a sculpture, tuning the hall while shaping it. UNESCO inscribed the campus as a World Heritage Site on 30 November 2000, citing it as a masterpiece of modern city planning, architecture and art together.

That was the working environment a Venezuelan artist of Ravelo’s generation grew up alongside. It established, at national scale and with state backing, that a serious work of art was something integrated into a building or a public space rather than something hung on a wall in a room built for hanging things.

Read the Caripito open-air museum against that background and it stops looking like an outreach programme and starts looking like an inheritance. The synthesis of the arts put the artwork into the fabric of a campus. Ravelo took the same instinct into the street of a town in Monagas, and added the step that Villanueva’s generation did not take, which was to hand the making to the people who live there.

It also explains why his work sits so easily against a piece of architecture. It was never designed to be looked at in isolation.

The building that already asked you to move

The siting is the part that makes this pavilion worth a longer look, because Venezuela has one of the few genuinely significant buildings in the Giardini.

The pavilion opened in 1956, designed by Carlo Scarpa and commissioned by the Venezuelan architect and historian Graziano Gasparini. It sits between the Russian and Swiss pavilions on a tight and awkward plot. It is built from concrete used in several registers at once, rough and smooth, precast and poured in place, and it carries the details that recur across Scarpa’s Venice work: stepped paving, a curved sculptural shelter outside, and rhythmic strips of glazing set into the roof so that the interior is lit from above and tied to the changing sky rather than to a window with a view.

Scarpa is the architect of choreographed movement. His buildings are organised as sequences: thresholds that turn you, levels that step, sightlines that open and close as you advance, light that arrives differently depending on where you have got to. You cannot understand a Scarpa building from a single position, and he did not design them to be understood that way.

Which makes the pairing in 2024 unusually well matched. An artist whose work is only completed by a moving viewer, shown at a building by the architect who spent a career insisting that a viewer move. Nothing in the exhibition’s framing draws that line, and it is the strongest thing about the pavilion. Two generations apart, one Italian and one Venezuelan, one working in concrete and one in cut acrylic, both arriving at the position that perception is something a person performs rather than receives.

Foreigners everywhere

The 60th edition was curated by Adriano Pedrosa under the title Stranieri Ovunque, Foreigners Everywhere, and it gave its central argument to artists who had moved: migrants, exiles, the diasporic, the outsider by geography or by category.

Ravelo fits that frame precisely and without needing to be adjusted to it. A Venezuelan who left for Paris in 1964 and stayed more than thirty years, who built a career inside the European kinetic movement, and who took the results home to a town in Monagas and handed the brushes to the people living there. The pavilion did not need to argue its relevance to the theme.

It sat, in 2024, alongside two other national pavilions this site has written about at length: Jeffrey Gibson in the United States Pavilion, and Julien Creuzet in the French Pavilion. Read together, the three make a coherent set, because each one puts a maker at the point where two places meet.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The temptation with a pavilion like this is to file it under optical effect and move on, because the surfaces are bright and the trick reads instantly.

What the 2024 pavilion actually set out was a position Ravelo has held since 1964, when he went to Paris to study two subjects rather than one. Kineticism gave him a method in which the viewer completes the work. The sociology of art gave him a reason to care who that viewer is, and eventually to hand the making over to a town in Monagas. Participatory Experience is a title doing double duty, and both duties are real.

The building had already made the same argument in concrete, seventy years earlier. Scarpa built a pavilion that cannot be taken in from the doorway, on a plot too tight to allow a single commanding view, lit from strips in the roof so that the room changes with the weather and the hour. Putting a wall of moving colour outside it in 2024 was not a contrast. It was a continuation, and the walk between the two is where the whole thing happens.