John Elderfield: “After concentrating on figure compositions in the later 1930s, Reverón turned to making paintings of urban and industrial subjects. Paintings like this are the first records in painting of industry made in Venezuela. Nonetheless, as now we’ve gotten used to in Reverón, it’s very hard to precisely see what’s going on.
La Guaira was the main port of entry from the Caribbean, not very far from Caracas.... Something like the Port Authority of New York, in the sense of the administrative organization for the port, and presumably this is what we’re looking at in this picture.
Reverón’s beautifully constructed pictures of industry seem to be taking him away from the isolation of El Castillete, into the modern world. And I think that nominally, that’s what they do. But these pictures have this very distanced quality, as if he’s recording this, but is pulling away from it.
In this picture, that quality is very much enforced by the way in which plumb center in the picture he paints a post, and then he paints another spar running right across the bottom of the picture. And also this is one of the pictures which feature very prominently a homemade frame made of the bark of coconut trees. And which certainly also has that sense of pushing it away.
He fashioned paintbrushes for himself, which were sticks wrapped indifferent kinds of padding, and he used natural materials for his colors. And all his paintings have a very strong, handmade, crafted quality -- something which is quite different to the mechanical activity which is going on in La Guaira.