Bartus Bartolomes

Bartus Bartolomes

Photo portrait of Bartus Bartolomes
Born Bartolomé Sanchez
1950 (1950)
Pregonero, Táchira
Nationality Venezuelan
Education University of Vincennes, Paris VIII, L'Ecole Normale Superieur, Central University of Venezuela.

Bartolomé Sanchez (Born 1950), better known as Bartus Bartolomes, is an international artist born in the andean town of Pregonero, the state of Táchira in Venezuela. He is currently based in Italy and France. Bartus creates using a wide range of mediums, including painting, drawing, caricature, photography, design and even poetry. In 1969 He wrote “Kitsch Art”, a manifesto promoting street artistic experimentalism.[1]

Life and Education

Upon completing his secondary education at Colegio de la Salle in the city of San Cristóbal in Venezuela, where he held his first exhibition of paintings at 17 years old, Bartus traveled to Europe and lived in Paris from 1968 until 1974, participating in the student movement which generated the famous Mai 68, and attended to some of the most advanced institutes of its time such as L'Ecole Normale Superieur; the School of Beaux Arts and the University of Vincennes, Paris VIII.

The family of Bartus owned the “Sanchez Pernia Estate”, one of the largest coffee plantations in the country covering more than 90,000 hectares from 1898 up to 1960’s. However, the newly emerging governments from the sixties, riding the waves and riches of a new oil boom, began to expropriate the land and reduced the agricultural production of coffee and other crops to a minimum.

In the expropriated lands, the government promoted and built the Uribante Caparo Hydroelectric Dam, a project that became detrimental to the Eco-systems of three Venezuelan states: Táchira, Mérida and Barinas, decreasing the productivity of the traditionally cultivated areas, affecting the rivers, local plants and bird migrations because among other things, this area was a pathway or transit corridor used by birds who migrated from Canada to Argentina and vice verse.

These expropriations and the negative effect they had on the environment he grew up in, affected the sensitivity of Bartus. He increasingly devoted his creativity to establishing links between art and water, and he promoted some cultural events that highlight the consequences of human intervention on the environment such as environmental pollution and global warming. Bartus considers the natural environment a legacy that must be protected, and water is the link that keeps all natural environments healthy one way or another.

In the early seventies, away from these trends, he published a new manifesto in San Francisco, California proclaiming a Transpositionism; a search on new proposals as symbolic calligraphy, haiku and visual art from which he proposed the new denomination Graphi-kú a combination between Haiku and Graphic.

In the mid seventies he returned home and obtained a degree in International Studies (Diplomacy) from the Central University in Caracas.

In the late seventies and early eighties he was involved in various activities carried out in Italy and Europe with the group Zeta International promoters of the New Visuality or Poesia Visiva with Carlo Marcello Conti, Lamberto Pignotti, Adriano Spatola, Gerard Jaschke, Eugenio Miccini, Luciana Arbizzani, T. Blittersdorf, Graziella Borghesi, Erio sughi among many others.

In the mid eighties, linked to a diplomatic post, he lived in India and China, where he participated in various cultural events. In New Delhi, the best gallery for artists of his time, Dhoomi Mal Gallery opened the opportunity to exhibit his works and shared art experiences with the exponents of the fine art new symbolism, and neo-tantric in the context of that country, including names that are now referred mandatory in contemporary art from India like Swaminathan, Gujurat Satish, Santosh, Francis Souza, etc, etc. In this period he has had a great reception by the critics and the international press in India and started his experiments in the painting-object by doubling sequined and including textiles to his art research.

Later he studied calligraphy in Beijing, China, and art Bantu, in Libreville, Gabon, Central Africa.

At the beginning of the nineties he came back to Caracas and tried to develop some graphics proposals subscribing to the project to edit Nadja; a magazine with writers JJ Villa Pelayo, Gustavo Avila, Milagros Bello, A. Barrios and G. Perez Rescaniere. The group disbanded prematurely due to dissimilar and divergent political conceptions.

Bartus returned to Europe in the mid-nineties and began his project on Global Rights of drinkable water, looking to motivate the international community in the creation of large Water Cave to fill in periods of drought at 65 countries experiencing shortages of fresh water seasonally and with more intensity in recent years by the failure of most governments International Agreements both in the area of Sustainable Development as the environment from Kyoto Treaty.

He currently lives between Italy, France, USA and Venezuela as an advisor to institutions in reference to development projects in Alternative Energy and equally devoted to compiling his books, promoting his artworks, installations, visual poetry and videos; resuming his various events as Khromatone and B2art in New York; Nest Gent Eco-Art Project in association with the Florida International University; Artic Landscapes in Beijing, China, Latinamente in Italy; Art for Water in Panama, among others.

Work

Mix Media, Ink & Acrilic. Dimension: 1 m x 1.40 m.

The artwork of Bartus Bartolomes transpires in an association of heart and mind that fuels his passion for art in all of its expressions. His creative endeavors are not static as though they might appear, rather they suggest a movement suspended between reality and representation of our contemporary society as it relates to social and geographical diversities, ethnical conflicts, political and cultural ambiguities, that includes a metaphysical research of humane solutions which dislocate or denounce the aesthetical camouflage of contemporary art.

The originality of his approach resides in the interior logics, which animate Bartus the artist. These interior reflections of the artist generate a dynamic that leads him to expand his energetic connections with a geographical territory combining the joyful freedom of his feelings with the ample variety of intellectual motivations that when joined in his process, never jeopardize the wholeness of his approach.

One of the main motivational targets implicit in his graphic creations has been to show, project, or portray his own reflections of what it means to survive as an artist who creates and produces in a cultural environment where civilization, the destruction of natural resources and contamination go hand in hand on a day by day basis, unstoppable, everyday.

Exhibitions[2]

Bartus Bartolomes has participated in international level exhibitions. In his work the dominion of the lightly iconographic and metaphoric color is appraised with variable subjects, especially post-modernist myths, new-minimalism and trans-conceptualism.

Air Sculpture. Dimension 8 m x 4 m. Installation. Bay Front Park, Miami, Florida. USA.

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

Publications[11]


References

External links

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