Skip to main content
Portela Surprises
22December
News

Portela Surprises

A solo show by Cuban painter Mario Garcia Portela (Pinar del Rio, 1942) was inaugurated on Friday December 21, at 4:00 pm, matching up his seventieth birthday.

 

Jose Marti National Library’s El Reino de este mundo gallery, La Habana, was handpicked by the artist to exhibit a brand-new series, which is made up of large scale pieces, based on the fragmentation of images as formal renovation and conceptual tampering. He has worked in this series for three years. Portela, an authentic landscape painter that blends academic tradition with contemporary trends, has explored another view of the genre that comes out of the detail and the exploration of beauty in what seems to be insignificant.

 

The works included in Tierra Oscura –nine paintings structured in five diptychs, three triptychs and one polyptych– frame segments of reality where human presence is suggested due to its effect on nature (cut trees, roads in the middle of forests…). The artist is interested in outlining a reflection on ecologist matters, while the strategy to create the pieces (the parts always maintain some centimeters of separation, although they are inevitably linked by sight) delivers a discourse on unity and fragmentation, the whole and the part, of philosophic and humanist roots.

 

The exhibition is going to be open in Havana through January 30, 2013, when it’ll be traveling around other provinces of the country.

 

Source: Press release