French tachisme and art informel, notable for the improvisational handling of paint and staining of the canvas, had a decisive impact on Venezuelan abstraction in the late 1950s, especially in the case of Ángel Hurtado who spent his formative years as an artist in Paris. In 1962 he began a new series with the painting Sign in Space, which paired the gestural approach of Tachisme with cosmic themes. Hurtado created pictographic “signs in space” through the application of broad, heavy strokes in blacks, browns, and grays, and a dark celestial orb that hangs in the upper left, balanced by a burst of lighter strokes in the upper right. The immediacy of Hurtado’s brushstrokes not only make his process clear but also create a sense of internal movement, as though the forms are in the process of change or transmutation. Hurtado saw these paintings as “inner landscapes” inspired by the “anxieties aroused by the barely known, the unsuspected, the unfamiliar, the utterly strange.” His language recalls that of abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb, whose Burst series of the 1950s explored the recesses of the unconscious mind while also responding to the anxiety of an age beset by global conflict and the atomic bomb. Sign in Space and other paintings in the series stand as Hurtado’s personal investigation of the dark recesses of the psyche and the existential crises of the modern world.
Ángel Hurtado was born in Venezuela and enjoyed a career as both a painter and filmmaker. He began painting informally in 1941 in his native El Tocuyo and then, two years later, studied briefly with Octavio Alvarado and José María Giménez while also experimenting with photography. In 1946 he enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas but withdrew in 1949 after a conflict with director Bernardo Monsanto. Hurtado left for Europe in 1954 visiting Caracas, Spain, and then Paris. While in Paris he worked as the cinematographer on four films and met a number of Venezuelan expatriates including Jesús Rafael Soto. Soto would be the subject of Hurtado’s first documentary film, Vibrations, produced in 1955. That same year Hurtado exhibited his abstract paintings in the Salon des Realités Nouvelles and, in 1956, the Première Exposition Internationale de l’Art Plastique Contemporain at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. He continued to make films during that period and produced his first fictional film in 1957, El cuarto de al lado, with artist Humberto Jaimes Sánchez. In 1957 his paintings were included in the Fourth Bienal de São Paulo and the 29th Venice Biennale. Hurtado returned to Venezuela in 1959, the same year as his first solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Section of the OAS, and in the following year became the director of the film department of Televisora Nacional, a position he held until 1965. In 1970 he joined the audiovisual unit of the OAS Visual Arts Section under José Gómez Sicre and produced numerous documentaries on artists such as José Luis Cuevas, Joaquín Torres García, Héctor Poleo, and Soto. Hurtado continued to paint throughout his career at the OAS until his retirement in 1989, eventually moving away from abstraction in favor of colorful landscapes with a distinctively mystical bent.
