Rolando Vazquez: Coming Soon to Galeria Excelencias

Since his last solo show, Comodin, held in November 2011 at the Visual Arts Development Center (CDAV) in Havana, the staff of Arte por Excelencias has paid close attention to Rolando Vazquez’ work, a young Cuban artist whose career is marked by an intense work as a teacher, since he has played a role in the education of new generations of artists, students at San Alejandro (where he taught for eleven years), since Cascarilla project. Vazquez has conceived curatorial projects such as the collateral expo during the Eleventh Biennial of Havana La verdadera historia de Cuba, which due to the tackled theme and the caustic of handpicked proposals brought about countless opinions within the national artistic sphere.

Vazquez is one of those shortly-promoted talents, although a segment of critics knows his work in depth and has written about specific elements of his career or his poetic. His work has been developed out of market demands, not because the artist is not aware of it or doesn’t know what methods take a contemporary creator to enter artworks promotion and circulation networks, at national and international levels. On the contrary, Vazquez is very in touch with it, but avoids being tied up and work to sell: he creates for himself, to satisfy his expression needs, in the “most traditional way”; he follows his spirit to create, taking a very particular view of the world and time as starting point, from the prism of the religion he practices.

On his proposals, Silvia Llanes has said:

“Just like other Cuban artists, whose work comes out of the religious factor, Vazquez’ production is focused on quotes, ideas and motives –artistic or not– that reveal the authenticity of his spiritual search, and the endless proposition of dealing with the identity as the axis of his artistic discourse.

“Dignity and authenticity are the points of reference around his artistic production, which amazes due to the honesty that flows out from his works; a fact that turns out to be balsamic in an age of affected individualism and well-known triviality. The memories have been turned into matter and placed with the precise intention of bringing about reflection and analysis of the universe where they have been elaborated.”

Arte por Excelencias project’s virtual gallery will be exhibiting a series of Rolando Vazquez’ unpublished drawings, titled Regreso al Paraiso, created between 2006 and 2007.