Enrico Armas

Painter

Enrico Armas, born in Caracas, he is a prolific and talented sculptor and painter. His father is the writer Alfredo Armas Alfonzo, Premio Nacional de Literatura 1969, and his mother the painter Aída Armas provided the artist with the artistic genes. He started his artistic life as a sculptor in 1973, when he was only 16 years old. Armas studied sculpturing art at the Graphic Arts Center (CEGRA, Centro de Enseñanza Gráfica) and engraving art at the Ecole d’Art Decoratives, in Nize, France; graphic arts at the Ecole d’Art Decoratives, in Paris, France, with a scholarship from the French government and the Neumann Design Institute in Caracas. He was granted an apprenticeship at the School of Fine Arts in Paris.

In Paris he attended several workshops dictated by the well-known artist Etienne Martín and Carlos Cruz-Diez, and courses with artists like Antonio Lazo, Alirio Palacios, Edgar Sánchez, Luisa Palacios, Manuel Espinoza and Luisa Richter. He worked as a Child Creativity’s teacher at the Federico Brandt Art Institute, in FUNDARTE and in a private elementary school in Caracas. In 1978, he illustrated the book “Escrituras para un libro de un Buen Amor” (“Writings for a Book of a Good Love”) by the famous Venezuelan writer Héctor Mujica. Enrico is an active member of the Venezuelan Association of Plastic Artists, AVAP, and the Workshop of Associated Graphic Artists, TAGA, and member of the Museum of the Stamps and the Designs “Carlos Cruz-Diez”, in Caracas.

Enrico Armas has participated in more than 140 international and national group exhibitions showing that ne can navigate from figurative to abstract and his work has had different periods and ways to express and share his feelings. Currently, Armas is well known for his impressionist style with a Dadaism touch in his always common element: the horse. In his paintings and sculptures we can see the presence of the horse as his distinctive symbol. His inspiration comes from Degas, Leonardo and his professor Alirio Palacios. His horse is a toy that reflects the life’s joyful and absurd side. Armas is represented in many private and institutional collections, and there are many of his open-air sculptures in Venezuela and many other countries