Ernesto García Peña

THE ART OF THE REVOLUTION

Flora Fong, Ernesto García Peña & Gilberto Frometa are representatives of the generation of artists who established their professional career as artists and art professors in the 60’s, and as such revolutionized and formed the aesthetics of the new Cuban society.

The gallery ArteMorfosis celebrated it’s opening year in 2015 with solo exhibitions of these artists because they embody the taste of the Cuban Society. Their work forms part of the collection of contemporary cuban art of the ‘Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana’, and is displayed in all art fairs in Cuba and – most importantly – their work hangs on the walls of many Cuban homes; hardly a household that does not display an edition or print of these artists – they are true ambassadors of Cuban visual taste.

The exhibition shows recent works of Flora, Ernesto and Gilberto and includes a unique highlight from each one: Inspired by their exhibition in Zurich, they created a painting that is displayed for the fist time in this exhibition: Flora shows ‘Primavera en Zurich’ (Spring in Zurich), Ernesto displays ‘La Gran Marcha’ (The Great March) and Gilberto celebrates the successful termination of his exhibition with ‘When Autumn Ends’.

As diversified the art of these three Cuban Maestros is, ArteMorfosis shows what unites them: Caribbean colors, tropical light, and Cuban ‘joie de vivre’.

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Solo exhibition of the Artists: Flora Fong, Ernesto García Peña, Gilberto Frómeta

Ernesto García Peñas exhibition ‘Island Lyrics’ in granma.cu

We applaud the article about Ernesto García Peña in granma.cu. It shows that Ernesto is well known an loved in Cuba and postulates that the development of the artist lies not so much in experimentations rather that the real adventure of his art lies literally translated: ‘in the purification of style and image decanting’.

Ernesto Garcí Penna en granma.cu

– ANTONIO FERNÁNDEZ SEOANE – Art Specialist –

Ernesto García Peña (Photo: Archive of Gallery)

Covering a creative period of approximately seven years of his powerful painting production, Ernesto García Peña now presents, in Zurich, a well-conceived selection of his artistic talent from his recent work to the present, in which voluptuous body forms are connected in a vibrant, unquestionably erotic style bursting with love. His style extends to zones of esthetic interest never before explored, such as the animal element of the horses in Poderosos (Powerful) and in the bullfighting magnificently portrayed in El último canto de la bestia (The Last Song of the Beast), or in music, present in Después de la siesta (After the Siesta) disguised precisely as bullfighting dreams…

Después de la siesta (After the Siesta)

Nineteen pieces in very diverse two dimensional formats are gathered together in Island Lyrics, the perfect title for an exhibition in the ArteMorfosis Gallery of Cuban art. The pieces contain the most representative characteristics of this great artist of color: blues, oranges and pinks, soft but with enough visual impact to make us shudder. And the apparent white, which totally covers the painting surfaces, in some of them as almost imperceptible element of subtleties denounced by the reality in nuanced themes that could likewise be ideal surfaces to discover his energetic and well-controlled drawing. Or the dazzling black (not value, but true color) that makes the figures fuse in daring abstract works Semilla (The Seed) and Tanteando el cielo (Testing Heaven). Likewise, two pieces of his painting production this year, heirs of this distinctive esthetic of smooth transparency that allows the union of bodies, are Devenir (Becoming,) and Enredos (Entanglements) with a range of colors of strong symbolic meaning.

Enredos (Entanglements)

Splendid iconography is presented to us as intimate and unique artistic confession. Here are the passions of Ernesto García Peña – his longings and pain captured in that, not in the least complacent, “lyricism” that denotes and connotes in significant representations, to take us to the plane of his inalienable identity. An identity that, also universal, certainly belongs to this other side of the world, to the islands bathed by seas whose reflections adopt the most astonishing shades to become resolutely Caribbean, Cuban. Those islands where the plentiful love of its inhabitants reigns – the love that has been so well captured by the creative genius of García Peña.

Havana, Sunday, June 21, 2015

A Vibrant Style of Dazzling Painting Motifs