The Other Face of the Night

The work of Gerardo Chávez forms one of the key elements of the surrealist painting which, beginning in the 1960s and continuing throughout the 1970s, defined one of the principal tendencies in Peruvian painting. The Other Face of the Night, a representative canvas of his early period, won the Acquisition Prize at the First Festival of American Art, held in Lima in 1966. At the time, Chávez had already abandoned the modernist figurative painting inspired by the work of his brother, the painter Ángel Chávez, and his teachers at the School of Fine Arts, where he studied from 1955 to 1959. The definitive break with local painting came during the time he spent in Europe from 1960 onwards; in the discovery of the cave art at Altamira and the legends and religious myths of primitive cultures, the painter would find a new focus. In this canvas the forms of a unique universe are already taking shape, inhabited by imaginary beings and seeming to exist in parallel with our own. At the same time, the dynamism of the whole and its spatial complexity reveal the influence of the great surrealist painter Roberto Matta, whom Chávez had met in Rome in 1961, and who had lent him early and decisive support.