EL PASADO PRESENTE

Gerardo Chávez is one of the most important representatives of contemporary Peruvian art. His work, with a clear surrealist accent, brings together objects and characters of strange appearance that intertwine, either in a provocative or aggressive manner, recreating compositions that exalt man and his nature. In Gerardo Chávez's own words: "... Painting cannot be talked about, it must be done, especially when it stems from an intuitive and almost animalistic chance encounter, where form and color become icons of the imagination. Currently, my work develops in an environment of beings that memory transports to the first night of all times and returns to the amorphous to find their new morphology through evolution. Passing through Altamira, Lascaux, Tassili, Easter Island, and the primitive arts that describe the simplicity and purity of expression inherent in ancient men, who speak to us of hunts, characters, and tender beasts of the past. Forms that were admired and transformed at the beginning of the 20th century by our great artists such as Modigliani, Brancusi, Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, and others who knew how to see that universal discourse with great eyes. Needless to say, my current painting also takes refuge in ancestral memory to evoke a present..." On this occasion, "The Present Past" will bring together a series of emblematic works created between 1960 and 1980, two decades in which Maestro Chávez made greasy pastel one of his favorite pigments.