ROLANDO PEÑA

"The greatest merit I see of Rolando Peña's expression is that he has opened a path with unexpected elements that had no origin to fulfill a function of art." – Alfredo Boulton

The matter of the twenty-first century transcends the atom: bodies, objects and digital systems are integrated In the same complex ecosystem. Nothing is isolated, no space is pure; Everything is hybrid. Images and words are connected to communication systems which in turn are infinite. To create is to design new relationships, to propose new alliances. This is what happens when the same concept mene and digital. This is an operation where two conceptual universes are linked: oil and computer science. It is the synthesis of an era distinguished by large data flows, transmedia narratives, provisional identities, organs connected to electronic prostheses, and crisis Global conflicts fueled by conflicts between information and counter-information. Rolando Peña has done this since the late twentieth century in Venezuela, Europe and the United States of America. His work Is a testimony of contemporary life: its advances, its crises and its expressive forms.

Mene Digital began in the eighties of the last century as a project of digitization of the three-dimensional work of Peña at the IBM Scientific Center in Caracas. Astrophysicist participated Claudio Mendoza and computer graphics expert Thomas Fromherz. The system was used WINSOM developed to model solids in digital format. Images were calculated on the IBM computer 3090 and were deployed on the graphics workstation 5080 in a monitor of 1024 x 1024 and 4096 simultaneous colors.

This process was a technological prodigy. Also, it was a pioneering project for the transdisciplinary way to approach the work of art. Rolando Peña came from New York with the experience of having been part of Andy Warhol's Factory and knew perfectly well that contemporary art is based on the conceptual integration of disciplines, the sum of experts in the process of production and use of the most advanced communication technologies of the moment. Mene Digital is a work of vanguard in the twentieth century and in the XXI. Today it is presented as an expansion of everything what was thought at the time. This means that it delves into the conceptual relationship between oil and art, incorporates new media, integrates state-of-the-art technologies and spreads through the internet.

This exhibition, exhibited at the Sala Magis de Arte Contemporáneo del Centro Cultural Carlos Guillermo Plaza de la UCAB, to commemorate the seventy-five years of the Venezuelan American Center, Is a synthesis and an update of the Mene Digital concept. Many arguments justify the commitment of the two institutions to ally themselves to show the work of Rolando Peña. However, there are two that stand out among all: the binational character of the work of an artist formed between Caracas and New York, and the relationship of his work with research and knowledge. This Venezuelan master has made the subject of his work, which led the art critic Alfredo Boulton to affirm that "the greatest merit I see of Rolando Peña's expression is that he has opened a path with unexpected elements that had no origin to fulfill an art function."