PLENILUNIO

For Carlos Estévez, his work is a sum of fragments towards the same goal: the possibility to understand that no matter how brief is an experience, it is the sum of each one that will craft ourselves. One of the most recognized and collected artists of his generation, in Carol Damian words (University of Miami): “Carlos Estévez joins the lines of creators who have dedicated their artistic labor to the exploration of humanity in the field of the universal experience.” Each of the works that compose the exhibit is a visual reflection that catches the artist's interest for disemboweling the mystery of existence, in that vital transit that we delineate everyday. The exhibit Pleniluno is conformed by a set of around 15 pieces of art, worked in acrylic on canvas of large and medium format. Estevez graduated in the Instituto Superior de Arte, La Habana, Cuba, in 1992, and received el Gran Premio del Primer Salón de Arte Contemporáneo Cubano in 1995. For the art critic and artist Jorge Bernuy, Carlos Estévez has shared actively the approaches that sustained the originality from the beginning of his career. Estevéz began to have some formal and conceptual interrogations that led to a work that is deeply related to the art for the art and with life. Estevez is an artist with a large culture and solid intellectual platform nourished in reflexive process from medieval literature, philosophy treaties, esoteric and religious books. He can be placed in the cultural and artistic context that characterized the 20th century. His interest in the environment, poetry, science and all that has contributed to feed his spirit make him a truly creator of this century with a privileged place in contemporary art. But he cares about the shape, through which he visibly expresses a feeling, a concept. The shape is linked to the spirit, which meanings can be transmitted to the viewer as an esthetic and existential experience. It is difficult to classify the work of Carlos Estévez following the patrons of the artistic movements; he works with found objects, toys, thread, clock needles that he transforms into part of his history. It might be appropriate to take the contemporary surrealism as the logical antecedent, with new propositions and new approaches. For that, Etevéz has studied, exploited, and searched in his inner self and, in an exuberant and powerful way, he has done the same with his superficial and deep expression. The formal and conceptual way that the artist has taken to express himself comes from the philosophical interpretation of his world. All of his figurative schemes should be understood as a metaphor of spiritual approaches. Those approaches are rooted in the human being. As more mysterious his work gets, his conceptual meaning becomes more human. Estevez has the consistence of the permanent, the continuous and the stable of the fundamental values. In many occasions, without giving a specific discourse, Carlos Estévez opens de doors of making his own and personal interpretation to the spectator. Without leaving his local traditions, the spectator and the creator are free. In the painting “The realization of the impossible” he reaches an extraordinary success of equilibrium, the absurd: the elephant poses in four legs on a golden ball with an almost acrobatic elegance. The works of Estevez communicate through the shape of the signs. The images, should express with immediacy, should not be translated into words. For that, we see in the painting “Orquesta de cámara celestial” how a group of musical instruments are transformed into something else, like the oboe turned into a snake, or a guitar turned into the body of a woman. We are in the face of a great master, in the face of a work where flows signs, symbols, free and lineal graphics, chromatic lyricism. Carlos Estevéz, the artist, claims our attention through the clever and contrasting approach of his work. He confront us with attractive superficies of color, and in the other hand, he violently profanes that space with virtuous geometric lines, winged characters, highlighting the contradiction between the figurative and the abstract; in between flat colored surfaces and the worked areas with fine textures.