Art of Mateo Manaure in University City of Caracas

Venezuelan artist Mateo Manaure was commissioned to create pieces for the University City of Caracas.

[2] Between 1952 and 1954, Manaure worked intensely in collaboration with architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, who was in charge of the campus project.

Working in art for urbanism, a growing trend in the 1950s in Latin America due to new advances in both fields, Manaure experimented with repeated geometric shapes "in search of his own style and [with] attention to [...] functionality.

The taste for thematic repetition is the antipode of my personality; I am constantly vigilant of renovation, always ready to face the challenge of tomorrow as an adventure of new plastic ideas, which allow us to enrich our visual language, be it abstract or neo-figurative...El color es para mí el elemento lírico por esencia, donde la vibración coloreada es principio pendular de la vida.

El gusto por la repetición temática es una antípoda de mi personalidad; estoy en vigilia constante de renovación, siempre dispuesto a afrontar el reto del mañana como una aventura de nuevas ideas plásticas, que permiten enriquecer nuestro lenguaje visual sea abstracto o neofigurativo en una sensibilidad y coherente.According to the Durban Segnini Gallery, reflecting on Manaure's life work in 2013, the works he produced for the campus "belong to a creative cycle supported by strong geometric abstraction with well-defined edges and solid-colored planes, known during his [career] as "geometric mural painting".

[9] Manaure's mural on the exterior of the curved Sala de Conciertos – in yellow, blue, black, and red – was said by Venezuelan heritage historian Mayerling Lopez to be an inventive response to the architectural restrictions, one that also created dynamism by combining horizontal stripes within vertical stripes, and the other way around.

[11] This mural and the one on the north face of the Paraninfo were both installed by Caracas ceramics firm Llamart CA in 1954 and reconstructed by Cerámicas Carabobo in 1985.

[16] Year: 1955 The former Escuela Técnica Industrial (Technical College) is located in the southwest of the campus and was designed by Villanueva as a separate but connected institution between 1946 and 1949.

[19] The mural known as La pared de ciencias was constructed in 1955,[20] at the request of the government, and is located on a wall of the former Technical College.

It was described by architecture scholar Sibyl Moholy-Nagy as "obsolete" and "brash"; she noted that when people visited the campus with Villanueva, he would "turn away with a pained expression".