Four Voices, One Expanding Territory: The Curators Who Have Written About the Work of Honys Torres

The work of Honys Torres has been examined by four key figures in contemporary Venezuelan art discourse: Morella Jurado, Katherine Chacón, César Araujo Torres, and Linda Phillips. Each of them—coming from different fields such as criticism, curatorial practice, art history, and expanded artistic research—offers a distinct perspective that enriches and deepens the understanding of her work.

What unites them is not only their Venezuelan background but also their international experience, intellectual rigor, and ability to situate Torres’s practice within broader conversations: migration, memory, Latin American visual culture, popular iconography, decolonial thinking, and the politics of images.

Morella Jurado: A Curatorial Voice Rooted in Graphic Culture and Anti‑hegemonic Practice

Morella Jurado is one of the most solid Venezuelan artists and curators of her generation. Her career spans artistic creation, institutional leadership, and critical thought. She has directed institutions such as the Museo Alejandro Otero and IARTES, and has curated editions of the Bienal del Sur, with international presence in Brazil, Spain, Russia, and beyond.

Her curatorial approach—often described as anti‑hegemonic—places the artist’s work at the center, allowing narratives to emerge from the material itself rather than imposing external frameworks. This perspective is particularly relevant to Torres’s practice, where the popular, the ritual, and the political coexist without hierarchy.

Jurado highlights the materiality, popular iconography, and affective dimension of Torres’s work, situating it within a Venezuelan tradition where the graphic, the symbolic, and the political remain in constant tension.

Katherine Chacón: Institutional Rigor and a Continental Reading of Latin American Art

Katherine Chacón is one of the most internationally recognized Venezuelan curators. She served as Chief Curator of the Latin American Art Collection at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas and directed institutions such as the Museo Armando Reverón, the Museo Cruz‑Diez, and the Museo Alejandro Otero.

Her experience across museums in Venezuela, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America allows her to position Torres’s work within a regional map, where Latin American visual culture, political memory, and contemporary aesthetics intersect.

Chacón offers a historical, critical, and comparative reading, connecting Torres’s work to broader genealogies: Latin American Pop, political iconography, mass culture, and the symbolic displacements of the diaspora.

César Araujo Torres: Decolonial Thinking and the Critique of Visual Power

César Araujo Torres is an art historian, university professor, and researcher specializing in decolonial studies, Venezuelan and Latin American art, and critiques of hegemonic visuality. He teaches at the Universidad de Los Andes and UCLA, is a researcher at GIAL, and has published studies on nationalism, architecture, and Venezuelan visual culture.

His decolonial perspective is essential for understanding how Torres dismantles symbols, reconfigures iconographies, and questions official narratives.

Araujo Torres emphasizes the friction between memory and power, the critical re‑reading of national symbols, and the political dimension of the image in Torres’s work—especially in series where history and pop culture collide.

Linda Phillips: Politics, Power, and Visual Narratives from a Curatorial and Artistic Practice

Linda Phillips is a Venezuelan visual artist and curator whose research focuses on the relationship between history, politics, power, and memory. Her work and curatorial projects span Venezuela, Europe, and Latin America, addressing themes such as violence, gender, archives, and historical narratives.

Her approach combines critical analysis with narrative sensitivity, allowing her to read Torres’s work through the lens of migration, popular iconography, and the tension between the intimate and the political.

Phillips highlights Torres’s ability to transform visual accumulation into an affective and political language, where the domestic, the ritual, and the pop become tools of symbolic resistance.

Conclusion: Four Voices, One Expanding Corpus

The presence of Morella Jurado, Katherine Chacón, César Araujo Torres, and Linda Phillips as interpreters of Honys Torres’s work is no coincidence: they are four figures with strong trajectories, critical depth, and international recognition, capable of situating her practice within a broad dialogue between art, politics, memory, and Latin American visual culture.

Their texts not only legitimize Torres’s work within institutional contexts—they expand it, contextualize it, and project it into contemporary debates on identity, migration, decolonization, and visuality.