Andean Family belongs to a group of social and Latin Americanist works from the first half of the 1940s that Poleo created after a learning period in Mexico (1937-1940) and traveling to Colombia and Ecuador (1941). On an extensive horizon of desolate mountains, the scene represents an encounter between a humble Andean family—father, mother, and daughter—dressed in typical attire and two men in the foreground of the painting. The man on the left has his back turned to the viewer, while the one on the right is shown in profile. The former carries a knife and the latter a machete. Given their body positions, it seems that the father and the man whose back is turned are shaking hands. Simultaneously, a game of looks unfolds, creating a sense of anxiety in a scene that would otherwise evoke dignity, candor, and harmony considering the posture of the bodies and the formal aspects of the painting, reminiscent of frescos. What should also be pointed out is that, while the piece does not show the hands of the characters—with the exception of the left hand of the man in profile, which is holding tightly onto a ruana—it insists on presenting the feet in almost the same color as the soil, suggesting that the bodies are rooted in the ground they inhabit. Poleo applied Latin Americanist and social motifs from the Mexican school to an Andean context, but with his own sensibility. He stuck to the native theme—the landscape and characters belonging to a popular social class—as well as to a kind of monumentality in the treatment of the human figure, although the figures here tend to elongate more than widen, as is commonly the case in Mexican mural paintings. His approach to the social theme was subtle and stayed away from the violent and expressive deformations used by the Mexicans to represent the victims or executioners. Poleo does not denounce or judge, he merely shows the state of things through a composed scene with a classicist and almost metaphysical air. After losing his left eye when he was a child, Venezuelan artist Héctor Poleo studied at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Caracas. After graduating in 1937, he moved to Mexico on a government scholarship where he attended the Academia San Carlos and closely studied the work of Diego Rivera and other muralists. In 1941 he returned to Caracas, held an exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes, and traveled to certain Andean countries, such as Colombia and Ecuador, where he came into contact with a different social reality and built a network with artists and intellectuals. Thanks to that trip and his stay in San Rafael de Mucuchíes in Venezuela, Poleo created a series of works—such as Los comisarios (1942), which earned him the Boulton Prize at the 1943 Salón Oficial—in which he reworked the Mexican model, opening up new roads for Venezuelan art. Between 1944 and 1949, he lived in New York where he consolidated his career: in 1945 he began being represented by the Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co. Gallery and held an exhibition at the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C.; in 1947 he received first prize at the Octavo Salón de Artistas Venezolanos and received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. While trying to perfect his drawing skills, always in a neo-renaissance style, his work began to lean toward surrealism and became charged with symbols, which, like in Ocaso and Héroe, express a pessimistic and desolate view of the world, linked to the horrors of World War II. Between 1949 and 1952, Poleo lived in Paris, a period in which, prompted by the study of pre-renaissance art and some of the modernists such as Italian artist Campigli, his work moved away from tri-dimensionality and details and became bi-dimensional, synthetic, and geometric. In the following years, he participated in the Venice Biennial (1954, 1956, 1960) and the São Paulo Biennial (1953, 1955, 1963). Toward the 1960s, he entered a new stage of poetic figuration, which showcased decorative-abstract shapes and color glazes, as well as lyrical and oneiric atmospheres. In 1974 the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas held a retrospective of his work, which was then taken to Mexico and New York. Poleo died in 1989.