By Claudia Retureta/ Photos Courtesy from the painter
Seventeen meters by eleven centimeters are sufficient for Adrian to present his City under the Sea. He, dips the city, I, I see it emerged or reflected in that sea that bathes, that limits it, that accompanies it, but that in any way we invites reflection, contemplation. In five pieces: four small-size canvases and the mentioned seventeen-meter panorama, Adrian Pellegrini del Riego wanted to evoke emblematic places, monuments, sculptures ...that Havana that is ours and that says of the author himself: "it gives us the impression of exist only for us. "
Venice, a noble and singular city, was named the first tourist guide dedicated to the City of the Sea, Venice. Published in 1581 and written by Francesco Sansovino, son of the great architect Jacopo, can be considered as the first stone of the myth of a city, celebrated for centuries and always resplendent. Francesco Sansovino, at once imaginative and pragmatic, realizes this primitive tourist guide of a city of the western world. The monuments are accurately described, the carefully chosen pictures and the streets of the intricate and fascinating urban topography transformed into a detailed treasure hunt map.
Establishing a parallel, and within the limits of the then surprising Spanish Empire, the natural of the town of Yunclillos Diego de Sagredo published in Toledo his book Measures of the Roman. This was no longer a guide for visitors of the remarkable city, but an exciting, intimate invitation to the work of the great Roman architect Vitruvius. It is the first book of architecture in Spain and the first interpretation of the Vitruvian codes composed outside Italy. Sagredo was never a professional architect in the modern sense of the word.
Crossing the Atlantic Ocean and contemporary of that same century, the city of Havana was outlined as Antemural of the Indies, and Spanish province overseas for navigation and money matters, scales and intrigues without end. A city that also acquired the urban profile that would later characterize it, that of a city of land and water, so often forced to live with its back to the sea, other parts of its foam, always fertile in its course.
When I think of Venice and Havana I feel that the smell of the sea comes to me. In the first, it serves as root and sustenance to its built legacy; and in the second, Caribbean lady of salty varnish that preserves and corrodes its sinuous streets and the lattice of the neighborhoods that always reserve universes to discover.
Havana city of sea like Venice, manages to give us the impression of existing just for us. The lens of thousands of photographers will never be able to capture what we are seeing, just as the words of the poets will not be able to return that moment, that instant, that ray of beauty that is reserved for us and that awaits us to pick it up.
Then, surrounded by the fragile water belt that almost manages to win the urban zone, we prefer to stay in our city: Havana. That is why I humbly give you these 17 meters of miniature city, which evoke the sea and those other magnificent buildings that adorn a dreamy and possible shore on the Adriatic coast. The sea is perhaps the only possible truth that unites, that sisters, that nourishes and never separates and always generous gives everything without asking anything in return.
Adrián Pellegrini
Painter
