Last Friday: Gabriel Sanchez Toledo at Lombillo Palace

Viajero anonimo, painting exhibition by Cuban creator Gabriel Sanchez Toledo, was opened on November 4 at Lombillo Palace, Old Havana.

Sanchez Toledo joins Cuban landscape tradition with a sui generis proposal, kind of upsetting, through artworks in which environments speak of actions – past actions?...future actions? According to David Mateo, author of the words included in the exhibition’s catalogue, it’s all about “premonition landscapes”, works that go beyond “localisms, geographical references” that extol “the ambiguity of natural referents, mixed character of spaces and multiple visual sensations that can be induce by them.”

Mateo also tackles the influence of important Cuban and foreign artists in Gabriel’s work, his mother among them, landscape painter Ania Toledo: “He soon showed his sensitivity and skills on the genre and has reached in a short period of time what takes almost a lifetime for other creators: the stylistic and mood characterization of his environments. He made it through the skillful treatment of dripping, meticulous use of tone gradations with ochre and gray colors, and the re-appropriation of dexterities from theater and histrionic scenography, especially those linked to the correlation between brightness and shadows, as well as the manipulation of lights.”

Landscapes usually entail the contrast of senses, given by the communion between an “almost surrealist” representation of nature and the presence of objects that seem to be out of context and put in the scene." Parabolic antennas, sophisticated ships, satellite instruments, ultramodern architecture, appear this time in front of desolated and lugubrious sceneries –covered by an apocalyptical impression–, objects that emerge just as if they were anticipated vestiges of a failed future. The subject gradually disappears as physical reference in the paintings and the symbolic weight of rationality in crisis gravitates over the selected artifacts.”

Further information on Gabriel Sanchez Toledo at his website, www.gabrielsancheztoledo.com