Cuban Painters http://socratesarchitects.com

1. Nicholas Socrates 2009
Urban Design: Art City Society
Case Studies of Young Cuban Artists;
Antonio Ferrer Cabello
Santiago de Cuba is a lovely city nestled between the sea and the
mountains, between blue and green. In order to understand that
city and its artists, to its singular geological and architectural
characteristics we must add a strong personality and a luminous,
colorful, extroverted, noisy and welcoming setting.
Antonio Ferrer Cabello sings to the city and its residents. Portraying
the former, he rejoices in improbable but real spaces, in the reddish
tone of its locally made roof tiles, in the hundred-year-old balconies,
in the cobblestones worn down by the incessant comings and goings
of its inhabitants and curious visitors on steep, narrow streets.
He captures the city's soul like no one else, beyond all visible forms.
Gazing at his canvases, we forget that painting is two-dimensional
as we "penetrate" those idealized panoramas, where it's always
noon and everything seems to doze in the stupor of the siesta. But
that sun doesn't burn us. That's how pleasant Ferrer's Santiago is.
In this regard, Jorge Hidalgo comments:
There are some of Ferrer's cityscapes that I call "rooftop
landscapes," because clearly he has painted them from his studio or
some high point, and they are impressive. This is something that no
other painter has achieved, not even the golden watercolorists, as I
call Hernández Giro, Bofill and others who – although they are
masters – have not portrayed that Santiago de Cuba that Ferrer
captures from the rooftops.
And Julia Valdés adds:
No one else is as adept in capturing our city's luminosity and
brilliant color in those landscapes, and from the viewpoint of
composition, the city's architecture and the contours of the land. His
stroke is dynamic and I would say that his most recent phase is
more daring than the previous ones, and his palette much richer.…

2. Ferrer Cabello creates Caribbean images. Feverishly devoted to
them, he has delved into an iconographic world which is ever richer
and more diverse, in constant evolution. The men and women are
inserted in the city as if it were a huge, colorful fan. In careful
detail, he explores the possibilities offered by his surroundings.
Nothing escapes the master's palette: carnival, the Cubans' joy and
love of crowds. He has given us a vast collection of portraits of
conspicuous characters from Santiago de Cuba and other latitudes,
as well as affectionate views of the countryside. Ferrer seems to
feel a constant need to reveal life itself. He is a man in his 90s who
is born each day, creating scenes full of images that are significant,
among other reasons, for their documentary value.
His works are like windows opening onto the world, helping us to
shape our values and ultimately our consciousness. This master has
the constant need to find the essential nature of the reality
surrounding us, often by delving into its narrative content. Ferrer
presents us with his own universe, which seems to be inexhaustible.
José Julián Aguilera Vicente
Cezanne showed us that the painter can be nature's sentient
receptacle; he understood the importance of the confrontation
between the drama of ideas and subjective consciousness. Aguilera
Vicente, whose long, prolific life has embodied this confrontation,
has explored new paths to their fullest and – as a result of these
vertiginous wanderings – offers us a rich and varied artistic
production.
The technique of engraving has no secrets from Aguilera. His works
not only tell the city's story; through a strong constructive tissue he
incorporates images stripped of their context, like informative
material susceptible to a new and less comprehensible reading,
coming out of a new kind of logic, compact and substantial. His
efforts are so innovative, his tireless spirit so youthful, stubborn and
constant, that his works hold their own against those of young
contemporaries. His son, outstanding Santiago artist Carlos René
Aguilera, observes:
"Despite the unquestionable maturity of [his] pieces, they possess a
fresh and youthful experimentation. In them, Aguilera questions
some things about human existence, as in the series Llanto por
muerto (Weeping for Death); in another, Nada es de nadie
(Nothing Belongs to Anyone), he ventures into the minefield of
ideas about originality and manipulation.

3. "One must imagine the context of Nada es de nadie, a time when
artists were determined to discover an indisputable formula for
originality and personal identity. All of a sudden, Aguilera takes
things out of context and begins to juxtapose morphemes of works
by living and active Cuban masters, declares that "nothing belongs
to anyone" in this way – without [Jürgen] Habermas or [Umberto]
Eco on his bookshelf, as one might today – and intuitively explores
a concept as intricate as 'appropriation,' without labeling it as such.
"In that gallery in Havana, the critics deliberately compared
Aguilera with the masters to whom he had alluded, perhaps
expecting a negative reaction from the latter. But in fact, their
response was one of support for his daring and profound reflections
on the structure of originality."
Enamored of his old city, he perpetrates it through various artistic
techniques. He surprises us with his harsh treatment of the subject
of human alienation, in which all hope of spiritual survival seems to
have vanished. In his expressionist engravings, man appears
abandoned to his solitude and his freedom (these features are signs
of his totally maturity); and the protagonists' facial expressions
indicate that they do not know whether to turn back or continue
down the path. We are faced with a daring work of art fraught with
ambiguity and double meanings; hard and silent, authoritarian and
enigmatic, that accompany man in his trek through the modern
desert.
This is a passionate artist who calls for a return to a dark terrain
feared by modern pragmatic man. It is the work of someone who
understands the false pillars on which reality is sustained, an artist
who seeks human liberty, not in property but in participation.
Striping off the masks, he confronts human beings with his hidden
truth.
Aguilera's expressionist work emphasizes the presence of an
existential separation and fragmentation. And, as Octavio Paz
pointed out, fragmentation "is the most perfect and vibrant
expression of our time."
Miguel Ángel Botalín Pampín
Miguel Ángel Botalín is a fervent student of the city's structure and
physical features. On one hand, he portrays the urban reality and
contour as the shapers of an architectonic space. On the other
hand, he tries to transmit the values of balance, distance, form and
proportion.

4. In an artistic analysis of his city – our city, which he considers a
living organism – we see that in the first place he emphasizes what
we could call its anatomy: narrow colonial-style alleyways, hilly
streets, sunny passageways, rooftops – in other words, the city as
inventory.
But Botalín also portrays what we consider the city's physiology: the
role of the streets, dramatic and communicative. And he moves
from physiology to psychology: the streets as drama, as the city's
internal scripture. In these elements the city's history is written,
and the daily events that characterize its residents. Streets are
important as inventory; they have as much form and life as the
buildings; meanwhile, in their formal representation their verticality
and depth resound. Thus, anatomy, physiology and psychology
create a whole revealing the city's vital essence.
In other words, Botalín presents to us a city that knows its own
morphology, its type of construction and its relative space. In his
work, we see the city as it is: a spatial structure, a collective human
accomplishment extended through time.
His canvases are a tribute to precision, to minute description, and
he converts the city into a form of light, in which poetry and
architecture are two constructive arts of the same ontological
category.
Botalín's city-light, totally loved, explored and perceived, reaffirms
the idea that his cityscapes are a mental concept built on the
association of memories rather than on geographical strata.
There is a great iconic intensity in this excellent artist's work, which
goes beyond what is being described and itself becomes the reality.
The mastery he has achieved makes it possible for the viewer not
only to see the landscape, but also to become a part of it. As in real
life, the viewer soaks up the sun's intensity, is dazzled by the light,
and even gets thirsty from the climb up the steep, sweltering
streets, devoid of shade in the intense midday heat. Botalín is so
powerfully suggestive because he appeals not only to sight, but also
to memory, awareness and experience, especially if the viewer is
from Santiago de Cuba.
Making use of a peculiar alchemy – technical mastery, precise
strokes, a well-laden brush, and a white, hot palette – he is
undoubtedly one of the city's most outstanding cultivators of this
genre.
Is Miguel Ángel Botalín a romantic with an archaeologist's spirit, or

5. a realist? We do not know. In any case, he is the painter-builder
who identifies with his city, and who in addition to painting it,
inhabits every bit of its territory.
In this master's work, the past blends with the present and extends
into the future. His is a time without seams, unitary and global. He
concentrates on the time that lays between imagination and
certainty, offering us images of our eternal Santiago, definitively
captured in his beloved views.
Reynaldo Pagán Ávila
Without a doubt, Reynaldo Pagán is one of Santiago's most
outstanding postmodern artists. During his intense and prolific
career, he has ventured into almost every trend. He knows and has
explored virtually all of painting's mysteries. He has sampled and
appropriated elements, and in some of his pieces he has spotlighted
exotic Eastern Cuban elements, with heavy doses of irony and
eroticism. Daily life is the theme of some of his other pieces,
perhaps alluding to his own childhood and pointing to violence
possibly suffered by the artist himself or others he knew, and
almost always associated with the presence of bars or rails limiting
the space. Humans are the subject and object of analysis frequently
related to individual physical and emotional appetites and needs,
whether overt or covert.
Pagán has created an esoteric character, an androgynous being of
jointed wood, timeless and faceless. It is a mannequin that he
manipulates at will, which serves to reveal diverse situations and
meanings associated with contemporary processes of human
existence. Rather than stating, he suggests: the figure is dressed,
playing a woman-violin, the surrealistic object of disquieting
appearance; or he falls prey to the powerful sexuality of a geisha
girl who dominates him – he lies at her feet while his sex blossoms
and she, the powerful female, uses it to satisfy her carnal appetites.
He can be active, tentatively holding a docile young man between
his legs; or he can assume the attitude of the fisherman in Puvis de
Chavannes's well-known painting and wait in a boat for the needed
food that he will presumably obtain from the sea, while elements
foreign to the original work are added, suggesting death and sex.
Likewise, the android personifies assassinated revolutionary Marat,
immortalized by David in his famous painting.
Surrealism and expressionism have a strong presence in Pagán's
work. Expressionism is seen in deformations and formal
exaggerations affecting the figure and the color treatment,

6. sometimes distorting the subject at hand; surrealism is revealed
through a myriad of absurd elements. Both trends take the viewer
from the dark sea, infested with threatening fish, to the human
congregations wrapped in their frustrations – which in turn adopt
deceitful forms of happiness, appearing as brilliantly colored
balloons coming together in the air, blocking access to the sky. The
viewer is also confronted with groups of humans who, all with the
same expression of panic, hold tight to an apparently inoffensive
chair.
A recurrent theme is that of exodus, of the trans-territoriality so
common to island people that generates suggestive images and is
symbolized through significant elements such as oars, which in
Pagan's work are capable of making navigable any object: royal
palms; dead people who rise up, like the woman who clings to the
oars, willing to escape even her own sarcophagus to join into the
migratory fever. Another suggestive image is that of the holocaust
at sea created by our condition as island dwellers, which on this
occasion is symbolized by a paper boat overflowing with an infinity
of beings with panic manifest on their faces; furthermore, the
newspaper from which the boat is made bears a text that reinforces
the message.
Just as exoticism is fundamentally represented through
personalities whose sexuality is often ambiguous, daily life is also
present in his works. Shown are the lack of communication between
couples, sexual frustration, the peanut vendor, the Santería
practitioner and her ritual adornments, precarious homemade
stoves, an old couple resting on a park bench, a woman knitting,
and other images forming an iconography of everyday life.
Reynaldo Pagán is a well-trained artist with a clear mastery of
Cuban and universal art (he pays tribute to Marcelo Pogolotti and
Ángel Acosta León), and he conveys his message through
techniques that are almost always in line with the selected themes.
He functions equally well in the classic brushstroke and in
aggressive expressionism. He adjusts the composition to his specific
interests, he alters the colors to vary the semantic force. His formal
and conceptual solutions provide the opportunity, from any
perspective of reality, to reflect, smile and meditate on the
existential anguish that threatens today's society.
Joherms Quiala Brooks
Joherms Quiala Brooks, who admits suffering from a kind of "Dalí
epidemic," combines his visual message with his cultural

7. experience, and most of all his critical references. Like Dalí, his
images are subjective, with a heavy semantic force. Like the
Catalan, he has formal training which allows him to create images
of great beauty and skill. He uses what in other painters would be
obsolete to achieve effective and poetic images. He is a paintbrush
virtuoso whose works are seductive and intriguing, presenting a
mystery that must be unraveled in order to perceive the artist's true
meaning.
Among the themes Quiala tackles are sex trade, the use of the
dollar in Cuba, an element which is aggressive but as ever-present,
recognizable, secure and constant, as the government-sponsored
food ration system within our planned economy. He also deals with
the Cuban landscape, the Tower of Babel as a symbol of utopia,
self-portraits (the artist feels he must describe himself), and a
recurrent element: a cloak made from elegant fabric and regally
draped, taking on a very suggestive corporeality which on occasions
seems to cover an invisible form. Is this a way to hide things, or
one of the various religious symbols appearing in his work? In any
case, this element seems to legitimate, through its very presence,
the actions taking place on earth.
In one of his landscapes, this artist, with his great religious
sensitivity, shows Christ on the cross, substituting a sickle for the
nails. In another landscape a crown of thorns descends from the
heavens and sprays the Cuban countryside with blood. In yet
another landscape, which could well be considered the completion
of a trilogy, a hand appears in the heavens holding a piece of skin,
whose double meaning harks back to Dalí's multiple image, or
"critical paranoia." These are three wrenching visions immersed in
the Christian spirit and referring to the specific moment of the
crucifixion.
Like many other Cuban artists of the 1990s, Quiala utilizes the U.S.
dollar's sudden presence in Cuban life as an expressive resource,
which he expresses basically in two themes: the flesh trade and the
dollar's aggressive effects on rural life, which he portrays in a
detailed, hyper-realistic manner. The aggression implicit in the
dollar's imposition suggests the sale and loss of identity. A
condensed drop of water clings to our sky, suggesting comfort but
with conflicting intentions, but this does not keep us from enjoying
the illusory configuration that it creates.
In several works, he employs the postmodern technique of
intertextuality: Christ painted in Byzantine codes, immersed in a
realistic landscape along with a black African; on another canvas, a
neoclassical landscape traversed by a machete used for cutting

8. sugarcane, treated in the classic style of a pop art comic strip. Yet
another painting harks back to Jeff Koons's One Ball Total
Equilibrium Tank. Without specifically alluding to well-known
brands, he evokes the seduction of consumerism through the
presence of canned beverages which, in open sacrilege, are served
to a celestial baby and provide refreshing moments to earth-bound
children and adults. Furthermore, the can located in glorious
ambiguity is surrounded by a crown of thorns. The artist criticizes
and deciphers the spirit of consumerism as part of the vital saga of
contemporary man. He understands and reflects the process that
leads an individual to turn into a consuming entity, and this is an
interesting conceptual proposition.
Quiala's works are a significant whole, in which each of the
elements acquires a different aesthetic sense and a dream-like
transfiguration moves happily down art's path, without becoming
cute or grotesque.
Guillermo Orlando Piedra Labañino
The work of Baracoa painter Guillermo O. Piedra is marked by a
pleasant expressionism and multicolored composition. One of his
objectives seems to be to portray the Cuban character through the
faces of hard-working campesinos, who gaze at us with kind and
honest expressions in open contrast with their powerful physiques.
Amid apparent chaos, the elements that occupy the space are
organized with a very personal compositional logic, conveying a
dynamism through the use of warm colors and intense tropical light.
One feature is the use of a clear line that emphasizes the subjects'
strength.
He himself explains that in order to achieve the desired effects he
uses a spatula, a piece of sackcloth, a paintbrush handle, and the
paint tube. The result is a manipulation of the pictorial material that
lends an unusual animation, a vitality that is the most distinguishing
characteristic of his compositions.
In contrast, his landscapes boast a clear balance, in composition as
well as in the use of color, thus transmitting a sense of peace that
apparently could not be broken by any force of nature. The
watercolors of brothers Juan Emilio and Rodolfo Hernández Giro had
a great influence on Piedra Labañino, inspiring him to create very
visual scenes that rival Nature herself, through an excellent
handling of color.

9. Roel Caboverde Yacer
Baracoa, where Roel Caboverde Yacer was born, is one of the most
beautiful regions of eastern Cuba. Everything there breathes
vitality, exuberance and color.
This cane cutter turned art instructor focuses his keen eye on an
imaginary world that speaks to his traditions. That is why his
themes are so simple, reflecting the universal experience of the
region's campesinos and fishermen. What limits can be put on an
artist who lives and works surrounded by majestic mountains and
an intensely blue sea?
Caboverde paints country festivities; hard work in the sugarcane
fields, in the shaded coffee plantations, and out at sea – often
preceded by tender farewells; cockfights; leisure time accentuated
by the sounds of a strummed guitar; dice games; and of course
strongly erotic scenes in which women await their men's return. "I
am a man in love with life and women," he has said.
His technique hardly varies from one piece to another. He is faithful
to a Mannerist expressionism resulting in an exaggerated elongation
of the human figure, a deformation that confers greater
representational force.
Sometimes the hands of his subjects are reminiscent of the
outstanding Ecuadorian painter Oswaldo Guayasamín. Added to his
compositional skills, his strident use of color confers a good deal of
drama to his theme.
His composition is very clear and ordered, with a precise
differentiation of planes. Multiple viewpoints characteristic of cubism
abound in a curious work, in which an architectural element
occupies the central subject's head. His expressionism is based not
only on the deformed faces: some figures with their backs to the
viewer assume postures denoting the harsh physical effort of
working in the cane fields. This is a device employed occasionally by
Pablo Picasso.
In his painting, he also deals with love and melancholy,
fundamentally through females like the young woman who waits,
nude, for her lover in the middle of a cane field.
Caboverde's pictorial pieces have a grotesque expressive presence,
created by exaggerated anatomical deformations. This can be
interpreted as an effective way of calling attention to the artist's
themes and makes his work unmistakably his own.

10. Rubén Manuel Beltrán Guerra
"Manzanillo has a brilliant, intense light. It never stops, even in the
shade." The man who made this statement was born and has lived
with the blinding clarity of the Caribbean Sea illuminating that 200-
year-old city.
Rubén Beltrán Guerra creates images with impeccable skill and a
clear vocation for landscapes. He rejoices in vistas of verdant
vegetation and old houses with red roofs and large windows
decorated with ironwork, where the passage of time has left its
mark on walls worn down to the brick and mortar, small towns with
cobblestone streets or dirt roads that contribute simultaneously to
rural tranquility and urban comfort. His aesthetic creed involves the
rationality of the elements and representational synthesis.
His landscapes are pervaded with an absolute calm that nothing can
alter. His composition is perfectly organized, with diagonals
reinforcing the sense of balance. This atmosphere is complemented
with a clear and intensely blue sky, plus a careful mimesis.
His recurrent dream is the ideal city – which he says does not exist
but is located "between Santiago de Cuba and Manzanillo." On one
of his canvases, he represents that ideal city surrealistically, in a
baroque composition in which the buildings seems to come up
spontaneously, without any regard for nearby structures. One of
Beltrán's achievements is having brought together – and at times
even mixed – classic urban symbolism with icons and features of an
imaginary city.
Beltrán's works contain many fascinating elements, with an evident
zeal for detail. While the task of defining landscape painting
continues to be difficult, the fact that it is being studied helps
preserve its critical importance.
Alfredo Sánchez
This artist, who states that theatrical design is his life, does
paintings characterized by stage composition, in many bright colors.
Using a number of elements from Chagall, Sánchez creates an
expressionism that is his alone, in which the line plays a relevant
part, dynamically dividing up space. The couple lying face to face
and levitating, like the celebrated Russian artist's Paris from my
Window; the wandering minstrel who assumes the pose of the
Green Violinist; the lovers among flowers; the nude woman with
blue skin reclining languidly against a bamboo trellis; a circus

11. atmosphere; cooing lovers; campesinos; visions of a city with
empty buildings and superimposed figures: themes undertaken in
the style of David Salle, employing fragmentation as a recurrent
device, although it is unclear whether it is for decorative purposes
or mere distraction.
As for technique, Sánchez has noted that he tends to be matterist,
creating volume with colors, or using pointillism as a way of
bringing vibration and mobility to the canvas.
Sometimes he complicates the scenes so much that the viewer
must do a great deal of decoding. He does not allow the eyes to
rest at any moment; on the contrary, he forces us to shift our gaze
constantly, in search of a coherence leading to ultimate
comprehension of the matter at hand. Thus, agitation is the
common denominator for all his work. It could be assumed that his
strongly chromatic paintings are aggressive, but instead, there is an
amiability that impacts the viewer, given that this procedure, with
its rhythmic spontaneity, can be playful and even fascinating.
Alfredo Cecilio Rodríguez Cedeño
Alfredo Rodríguez, who never had formal art training, has absorbed
the Cuban and international landscape painting tradition through
the examination of color plates and bibliographic material. In this
way, he has received the influence of the Barbizon School, 19th-
century British painters and the best known Cuban painters in this
genre.
Given that lack of training, the technical skills he has acquired are
surprising. He creates panoramic vistas into which he inserts
diminutive but precise elements representative of the Cuban
countryside – palm-thatched huts and royal palm trees; oxcarts;
streams and bridges; daily labors; topographical contours – and
through them he demonstrates a deep love linking him irreversibly
to the landscape he recreates.
One of his most impressive works shows a winged but isolated
island that tries in vain to follow behind a flock of migratory birds
fully enjoying their freedom of flight. This embodies a great
contradiction: the island is shown as a floating space that is heavily
constrained by fragments of a wall and on its verdant surface,
among the huts, palms and tropical trees, is a giant, powerful wing
attempting in vain to take flight. Despite its diverse elements, the
piece functions as a whole; the details, nuances and intensities are
placed there with a clear purpose, and always to good advantage.

12. Another of Alfredo Rodríguez's significant pieces, full of symbolism
and signs, is also a landscape, but with a twist. It is located on the
tablecloth of a large rectangular table, creating a constant dialog
between movement and stillness. It expresses life's multicolored,
dynamic nature as well as stasis – with human beings to one side –
that converts the scene into something stable and permanent. The
overall effect is quite elegant.
Another of his favorite themes are hands. If I had to categorize
these scenes, I would put them in the broad classification of
expressionism, as the viewer can easily understand.
Like all expressionist artists, Rodríguez interprets reality by
extracting it from the natural, cultural, environmental and
experiential surroundings. He takes the hands out of context and
places them in an atemporal dimension. They become tensed
muscular structures suspended in space and time, without a
perceptible setting, without perspective and without support. They
are distorted muscles, twisted and anguished roots, hands forged
through labor that occupy an imaginary and unsettling atmosphere,
as well as being highly erotic.
The greatest value of these pieces is the combination of factors that
allow the artist to achieve his objectives with a wide variety of
effects.
Marcos Pavón Estrada
Born into a poor farming family – which in pre-Revolutionary Cuba
deprived him of any possibility of education – and infected with
polio during childhood, Marcos Pavón was faced with a sad reality.
When he was just a few years old, paintbrushes substituted for the
toys he did not have, and he taught himself how to paint. His very
limited frame of reference was nourished with the legends that rural
families pass from one generation to another: stories of elves and
apparitions, witches and ghosts.
In 1963, when education became freely available to all Cubans,
regardless of gender or social status, Pavón took his first art lessons
while a patient at an orthopedic hospital in Havana. Upon his return
to Holguín province, where he was born, he was given a specialized
education; after graduation he found a job that kept him in close
contact with the world of painting.
There is no doubt that the life of this hard-working artist is unique.
He says that painting is a challenge, but he always succeeds. His

13. life is a challenge and he has succeeded. Unable to use his hands,
he holds the paintbrush with his mouth, and remains undaunted
despite the difficulties.
The subject matter of his work is often heart-wrenching, like the
painting of the mother whose screams of despair come from her
very gut and can even shake tree roots. She is holding two squalid,
inert children who could well represent the truncated, disjointed and
cruel childhood suffered by the artist himself. The woman's face,
exploding with pain and rage, is drawn with precise, intensely
expressionist lines that seem to tear into the picture. There is a
violent chromatic contrast between the central figure, painted in
yellow, and the twisted tree, just as strong as she is, painted in a
gray-blue and creating a strong and balanced composition. In the
background, slender palm trees and silhouetted mountains make it
clear that this tragic scene is taking place in the Cuban countryside.
In another one of his pieces, a pair of lovers embrace tenderly, with
happiness frozen on their faces. The encounter takes place in a
factory setting, with a background of chimneys belching out smoke.
This makes for a perfectly balanced composition, and the pure
colors accentuate the work's message.
Another of his favorite themes is rural work. In a multicolored
composition, two campesinos are located very close to each other.
While in the foreground one of them is resting his hands on a book,
the other is planting a seedling. Are they both Marcos Pavón? Are
they doing what he wanted but never could do? Is this an allusion
to the dirty trick life has played on him? Once again, there are well-
defined lines that emphasize the young workers' musculature, plus
the twisted tree trunk, and the mountains' contour, painted with a
technique ranges from pointillism to long, extended strokes.
And there is the world of the elves, reflecting a childhood they
inhabited in the campesinos' fascinated eyes, in the whistle of the
wind, hiding their faces during the day, appearing and disappearing,
changing and fading away as the sun illuminates the land.
This exceptional artist, a model of courage and constancy, presents
us with a body of work with deep significance. He has touched on
eternal human themes, ones that define our very existence. Those
themes are love, pain and work.
Jorge Luis Hernández Pouyú
Pouyú, who declared his break with figurative art in 1998, presents

14. us – through his series Motivos Reales (Real Motifs, 2000-2002),
consisting of about 30 pieces – with a new stage of artistic creation
in which he feels "free and unfettered." This freedom of choice has
led him down the difficult path of abstraction, from vitalist and
intimist positions. His work still responds to his need to express
himself; through his work he intensely communicates his reality. It
is not by chance that this series is entitled Real Motifs.
The artist, whose technique involves gesture and matterism, is the
first person awaiting the result of his acts upon the canvas, since he
has no preconceived notion of what he will paint. To a large extent,
the pictorial elements flow and overlap somewhat spontaneously,
with chance playing a large role in the work's final outcome.
Enticing images emerge, greatly influenced by the titles (which
reveal that he is an avid reader); his visual metaphors constitute a
real challenge to those viewing the work.
His paintings, intended more for visual enjoyment than for
interpretation of symbols, are full of lyricism, and unforeseen
structures emerge. They are sets of signs, consisting of shapes and
colors that reaffirm the concept that a painting exists only to be
viewed.
Pouyú paints with honesty, without concessions or flattering
formulas that his interior truth would not permit. He obeys an ethic
that should not be confused with compromise. His goal is "painting"
– in other words, affirming artistic values (always in a dialectic
struggle between doubt and certainty), in order to create new
spaces resulting from his capacity for innovation and his will to
express himself in his own language.
The painter often insists that he is an expressionist to the core, and
he interprets reality by isolating it, within its surroundings, from its
emotional context and its environmental circumstances. Through
form and color, he has created a magical space where his Real
Motifs develop. At times violent, they do not tolerate any
indifference and on occasion they betray a contagious melancholy,
while at other times they communicate optimism. Thus his painting,
in its current phase, exudes a semantic ambiguity and, facing the
new millennium, the artist demonstrates that he has achieved a
greater conceptualization of the motifs he has undertaken.
Eddy Ochoa Guzmán
Despite what one might think, Eddy Ochoa is not a hyperrealist
painter; he himself has confirmed this criterion. Indeed, if we

15. compare his work to the hyperrealist or photorealist pieces by
Malcolm Morley – who initiated this trend – Ochoa's astonishing
landscapes have nothing to do with that form of painting, which
emerged as an echo of pop art and is the product of a consumer
society that tends to subject its subject matter to the fierce
dictatorship of photography, simultaneously dehumanizing the
theme by rejecting all points of contact with the normal
representation of the human presence. This trend, also called "cold
realism," almost always puts its subject in an urban setting,
assigning it a leading role, stronger than the role of humans.
Ochoa could not be identified with this trend, either in his themes or
in the technique he employs. His main interest is capturing our
beloved landscape, which José María de Heredia praised in his
famous "Ode to Niagara."
Of all the possible media on which one can paint, Ochoa chooses to
express himself through oil on canvas, in a medium-sized format.
Painted in an intelligent, well-conceived plan that is never
ingenuous, his Nocturnos (Nocturnes) spark a restlessness inside
us, despite the apparent tranquility of the landscape. That
restlessness comes from the light that transgresses conventionalism
and fluctuates between reality and unreality, reflection and
questioning, because that peculiar illumination makes us wonder,
"What is it? Where does it come from?" The answer would clear up
the mystery that transcends these pieces. We note that surreal
luminosity in Ensueño de la tarde (Afternoon Dream), limiting
space, defining planes, denoting contours and allowing this
perceptive and skilled artist to revel in the details of his impeccably
crafted work, which is simple in appearance but also quite profound.
He is an artist who, from a position of radical independence, confers
knowledge on painting, embodying a principle of Cezanne's in his
pictorial treatment: he constructs masses and volumes through
color, while his fine, precise sketches center on psychological
evaluations of his admirably portrayed landscapes.
These works reflect the confidence of an artist devoted to the daily
task of painting. Repetition builds skill, which – when combined with
sensibility – makes it possible to work miracles.
Danis Montero Ortega
Whenever artist Danis Montero seeks our attention, it is in the
name of landscape painting. At this time he uses mostly oils and

16. acrylics, adding textile effects that sound a dramatic note. After
going through various stages, currently the painter catches our
attention through the ambiguity of his attractive but enigmatic
landscapes, the fruit of an inexhaustible inspiration belonging not to
the natural order, but to an imaginary one.
In the series Concreciones (Concretion), we are invited to move
into hidden reaches, to discover and capture the essence of the
landscape, which is concealed behind the evocative appearance of
these images. We wonder whether we have "seen" the real
landscape. This may be the artist's intention, arising out of his great
capacity for invention and his determination to speak in this
suggestive language.
These forms, which appear to us as natural or architectural, emerge
mysteriously from the represented spaces, full of sensual
connotations. His creative method consists of gestural brushstrokes,
letting the details flow with absolute freedom. Apparently
dissatisfied with the art around him, the painter searches for
themes from within himself, in his own potentialities, letting his vital
force guide his hand in the creation of Concretion.
This technique has fostered the emergence of images that, although
vaguely familiar, reveal a new type of landscape painting with a
wise compositional strategy, in which it is possible that the line
takes on greater importance than before. The somber colors to
which Danis has accustomed us is softly seductive; the light that
brings to life well-designed forms helps to highlight a skillfully
achieved combination of transparency and opaqueness.
On this occasion he reveals a new approach to composition,
incorporating figurative and abstract elements. He has broken with
traditional watercolor techniques through the insertion of
experimental formulas, including textile and collage.
Upon the unpolluted white of the Bristol board, the range of blues
and grays, yellows and ochres strongly reinforce his message: the
environment is in real, not imaginary danger. His aggression takes
on definite but perfectly recognizable forms. We are surprised by a
human figure, always absent but necessary here as an attacked or
attacking being, or expressed through an abstraction filled with
lyricism and drama.
His large and small pieces, figurative or abstract, alert the viewer to
the catastrophe to come. Humanity's future is endangered. All of
us, at Danis's side, must save our landscape, which is tantamount
to saving life.