Como medio expresivo se vale de varios planos superpuestos de telas sintéticas o menudas tramas metálicas portadoras de fragmentos de la imagen que, perceptivamente, configura y completa el espectador. Este particular juego de planos y espacios, de sombras y transparencias, de distancias y proximidades es como Jonidel Mendoza referencia plásticamente las cambiantes dimensiones de la existencia humana y las huellas que su vivencia deja en nuestra corporeidad.

De aquí que los personajes que habitan las obras de Jonidel Mendoza son seres etéreos, silentes, levitantes, suspendidos y despojados de los rasgos físicos que los definen. Fantasmales siluetas humanas y fragmentadas palabras imposibles emergen de una trama de manchas, sombras y líneas de hilos y alambres. Estos recursos se hacen suficientes para estructurar una creativa propuesta artística donde la pintura y el dibujo, lo plano y lo volumétrico, lo real y lo virtual se integran en un conjunto de armoniosa plasticidad. Los objetos de arte de Jonidel Mendoza son, en definitiva, una creativa manera de hacer evidente las formas de lo encubierto.

Jonidel Mendoza, Image and Visual Speech.

The relationship between image and visual speech became a landmark in the plastic proposals during the first years of the XX century. Image and a visual discourse of white in white (my own appropriation of a poetic work of the Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade), constitutes the central statement in the work of Jonidel Mendoza, a young artist of Venezuela and the world. Whites, more or less intense, are mixed on a surface shaped by several bearings, tissues, gauzes, tulles, on which he has drawn a figure-character in black, generally a silhouette, stressing nonetheless its face features, at times with crayon or acrylic, other times with a thin wire which he wrings and manipulates as if it were a free hand-drawn line. With a dexter hand he handles the drawing aiming at mastering the delicate surfaces of the material, which, as they overlap inside-out or vice-versa, or as the spectator might perceive, it virtually produces the corporeity of its figures as well as its movement, thereby placing silhouettes on whites with poetic significance. It is the vertical and horizontal white, populated with profound silhouettes which dangle in a corporeal reality, among shadows and virtual volumes.

The characters of Mendoza could be considered as comments upon a provoking and sensual speech. The series “Reflejos móvil” characterizes the roads which the artist has followed during the last years. A road which he began quite early, as he inquired into the behaviour of aerial drawing on transparent materials or the weaving of metallic tissue, as well as in the radiographies approaching him to Man Ray. In his case, the mixed relationship of the different unconcluded images, overlapping one another until they shape what could be a virtual connection of an image which the eye composes bi-dimensionally, despite the multiple special dimensions of his work, while the mind provides its significance. One speaks about transparencies in this work; in reality, it is a concept used as a pretext to produce the image and the speech in a systematic marriage related to the proposals hustled by the history of Art. It is evident that the artist has been nourished from the studies and findings of Venezuelans Gego, Jesús Soto, whom he considers his masters, as well as from Alejandro Otero and his Abras solares, but we could also, with a slight analytic audacity, refer to the figures of the white period of Armando Reverón. It is however evident that Jonidel overtakes them and gives them another sense by using several spheres for expression: movement, constructivism and figuration. Likewise, he appropriates himself of the history of abstraction and kinetism which developed in Latin-America at the outset of the fifties; in Latin-America, even counting with certain explorations in the Abstract and the “geometricalization” of figures, such as in Joaquín Torres García, Lucio Fontana, Gyula Kosice, Enio Iommi, Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel and, at the international level, in works such as those from the Spanish artist Manuel Rivera, who, “in search for light and space” ripped the canvases, he used the whites and then the black-and whites in order to overlap several transparent planes on the bearings.

Moreover, the work of Mendoza needs the space-time relationship to attain its complete development. Saving distances, the perception of the figure in the eye of the beholder goes back to the Impressionists; for them color was the vital element of interpreting a new way of seeing. In the case of Jonidel Mendoza, still a young man, it means the purity of white transparency, the interrupted line, the unconcluded features and the fumes of a material which, while being of a hard consistency, behaves as lightweight. One should also inquire upon the self-contained architectural complexes. His first known works were big format-boxes in which he developed, as architectural complexes, image and discourse. Two years ago such proposals became more complex and nowadays he takes our of the wall or box the figure to shape a shadow, cut in such a way that it relates to the others behind, thereby creating an empathy between figures which produce a movement, emanating from their interior life and projecting them to the outside.

Evidently, there is a psychological effect generated in the receptor-spectator from the work of Jonidel. The intimate relationship, at times contradictory, between rational and non-rational factors (ways or drawing, dissimilar materials, irregular dimensions of the collated figures, time and spaces), cannot escape the control of the artist to determine the shape, thought and drawn, nor the basic functions of structuring the complete art work in its subtlest transparencies. For the time being, to define a modality and a concrete plastic tendency in the work of Mendoza becomes quite a difficult task, as it does not respond to the pictorial or sculptural codes, nor it does to abstraction or exact figuration. The singular effects produced in a same work, owing to the difference in materials used and the tangled work of overlapping of figures, even those which protrude from the wall, are askance from the structural elements and their dispositions in the plastic space; consequently, the artist is working on an unprecedented path as regards a formal and conceptual proposal.

Jonidel writes his figure on transparency, it is a creative task which attracts the eye, it opens to figures of today which nourish from urban canticles and yet they do not lose the North; they are not foreign in their own environment; they belong to the same artistic race; in conclusion, they are humans, debating between being and not being.

A new figuration, expressionist? Time will tell.

Belgica Rodriguez

Caracas, February 2007