A Vibrant Style of Dazzling Painting Motifs

– ANTONIO FERNÁNDEZ SEOANE – Art Specialist –

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…

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.

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