EVENTS

The exhibition EXISTENCIA NATURAL | NATURAL EXISTENCE complements and summarizes the configuration of a cycle of meetings of Guillermo Portieles with the city of Havana. We attend a two-dimensional representation of the environment that is structured and balance from a rational or conceptual point of view; that it has in the proof of the immersion of direct experience and contextual exchange its main resources of artistic inquiry.

In this set of works, adjoining to the landscape genre, the best pictorial artifices of the artist is also recognized. I mean, to the fusion between drawing and painting, to geometric elucubrations, harmonic gradations of color and the use of transparencies.

The mixture between the architectural ensembles represented by the artist and the figures of the elephants, sometimes deployed in a direct way and other in simulated way, reinforce the foundation of this poetic perspective and philosophical moments that are defended in the exhibition.

We could recognize, as the first instance of that connection, of that parable, an explicit contrast, a struggle, between the wild and civilized spirit, between the sense of inadaptability and rooting.

Other symbolic behaviors associated with the animal and its capacity, such as support and compassion, self-recognition, fidelity to the paths of life, predisposition to play, inclination to duel, also contribute to diversifying readings and interpretations of the works; loaded with meanings, infinite paradoxes, these “urban environments” representative of a new state of enthronement within the intellectual life of Portieles and its symbolic production.

David Mateo

Art Curator