August 2016 – YAOH AG – Yet Another Old Holding

Eduardo Roca - Choco - Exhibition from November 4 through December 3. Vernissage: November 3, 6 p.m.

Save the Date: Eduardo Roca Salazar «Choco»

Vernissage: November 3, 2016, 6 p.m.
Exhibition: November 4 through December 3, 2016

Choco – EQUILIBRIO HUMANO – November 4 through December 3, 2016

As the title ‘EQUILIBRIO HUMANO’ suggests, the works of the Afro-Cuban Artist Eduardo Roca «Choco» (*1949, Santiago de Cuba) are characterised by their search for equilibrium of man with himself, nature, his spirituality, his ancestry independent of ethnicity. His work – whether painting, sculpture or print – is characterised by it corporeality which is formed by the motives as well as materiality.

ArteMorfosis is the first Swiss gallery to display oil paintings, collagraphies and wood sculptures in Switzerland of the international renowned artist.

Master of collagraphy like no other in Cuba, his solid pasting and sensual volumes identify him among his contemporaries as the most advanced among the figurative expressionists with a vocation for abstraction.
Choco is like his painting: delicate and at the same time expansive, penetrated by chiaroscuro and seductive by nature. His seduction compels us to savor his paintings with pleasure, to submerge into the rubber and the cellulose, to find support on the wood and linoleum, on the metal and vinyl. He takes us by the hand to a world where the aroma of tropical fruits, the arms and legs of bodies that mix in their ethnicity are captivating, to affirm the identity values of the island, to help us understand a cosmos he has created with his roots and his blood.
Nobody pretends to decipher the mystery of his painting; it remains submerged in the artist’s heart. But indeed, in his art lies the essence of Cubanness, that forgotten essence; and what was forgotten he rescues with the tools of his talent and sensibility, and to which he grants universal rank.
Choco knows that only art accompanies us on the adventure of transgression and metamorphosis. His work contributes to a better understanding among us as human beings, because in it we discover another road to the kingdom of fantasy we all hope to reach, and where art always leads us; this time by the hand of the great Choco.

Miguel Barnet
Words at the exhibition Abanico de posibilidades (Range of Possibilities), 2004, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana

Pedro Pablo Oliva Einladungskarte - Gesichter einer Insel -

Pedro Pablo Oliva – FACES OF AN ISLAND

Vernissage: August 25, 2016, 6 p.m.
Exhibition: August 26 through September 17, 2016

Pedro Pablo Oliva – FACES OF AN ISLAND- 26.8.2016 thhrough 17.9.2016

Pedro Pablo Oliva (Pinar del Río, *1949) counts as one of the most remarkable living painters of the Cuban art scene. For his lifetime achievement he was awarded the Cuban National Prize for Visual Arts in 2006. Over 4 decades of an unbounded fantasy and relentless observations led to a lifetime oeuvre of technical excellence, visual fantasy, psychological acuteness and conceptional coherence.

At the exhibition FACES OF AN ISLAND ArteMorfosis displays bronze sculptures and paintings from 2013 to 2015, most of which are displayed publicly for the first time.

Pedro Pablo Oliva

By Leonora Oliva

When Pedro Pablo Oliva was announced as winner of the National Prize in Visual Arts[1] in 2006 no one was surprised. As stated by David Mateo, this was “a prize of public consensus”. And it so because Oliva’s work is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest examples of visual arts in the Island. The far-reaching distinction did not entail the establishment – already ensured many years ago by said “public consensus” – but merely a confirmation of the substantial contribution made by this creator with his work and his preeminent place in the history of Cuban art.

Pedro Pablo Oliva’s work has been signed by the spirit of the so-called “generation of true hope”, the one that flooded the Cuban artistic field during the afflicted decade of the 1970s, mainly molded – artistically and ideologically – in the late 1960s in the classrooms and workshops of the National School of Arts of Cubanacán, first of its kind founded by the still young Cuban Revolution. Said academic training, the staff members and an improbable mixture of nostalgia and utopian projection (in addition to which a certain sense of urgency exhorted to retake and concretize the search of a national idiosyncratic expression) ended by approaching many of these artists, in their form and spirit, to the project of the first Cuban modernity. Those were years of bursting lyricism and utopian idealism disguised as realism, concretized in works that praised rural life, the anonymous faces of the people and the epic of the daily individual, symbolically validated by the revolutionary power. This imagery and its tradition were then flaunted and defended as key identifying elements in the expression of the “Cuban essential”·.

Oliva succeeds in summarizing the spiritual commotion of a convulse Cuba with images that are anagrams of daily life. His artistic proposal is born from the day-to-day, from the way in which the common man grasps the realities and circumstances that surround him. His is an anecdotic work, of local glance, and it is precisely this condition that reflects its universality. Pedro Pablo Oliva demands from the viewer the understanding of something more than the formal aspects of an image or the conceptual precepts of a creed or creative manifesto: he demands the search and understanding of a context, of a “different” scene that, in addition to being “exotic” in principle, shows unparalleled authenticity if compared with the rest of the planet, and is likewise filled with humanity.

The pieces that make up Rostros de una Isla (FACES OF AN ISLAND) correspond to the painter’s work from 2013 to date. This is a tiny selection of the Oliva’s plentiful artistic production, an artist who does not stop his creative activity one second. Despite having been diagnosed Parkinson’s disease in 2010, Pedro Pablo does not abandon his canvases or his cardboards: he is ever more obsessed by the control of the line, holding on to this act that defines him. Both sculptures and drawings exhibit the surreal of the Cuban scenario, with this artist’s paradigmatic style of sketching figures.

[1]Highest distinction granted by the National Council for Visual Arts in Cuba (CNAP, the Spanish acronym) to a Cuban artist living in the island, for the work of his lifetime.