Land-Scape of the Cuban Art curated by Henry Ballate
Land-Scape of the Cuban Art
OPENING: Friday, May 17, 2019
6:30PM-11PM
Ciro Quintana, through his work, puts us face to face with tragedy and shows us what we may not want to see: The reflection of our own reality, suffering, struggling, floating or shipwrecked. The work of Ciro, exceeding all of the aesthetic and conceptual values exposed and analyzed by great connoisseurs, is a lament, the survival or the escape of that woman, the republic, the Cuban art.
Henry Ballate
Ciro Quintana is one of the cardinal artists within the second wave of the so-called Cuban Renaissance or New Cuban Art. His work, along with that of Ana Albertina Delgado, Adriano Buergo, Ermi Taño and Lázaro Saavedra, shook the artistic and social panorama of Cuba in 1986 when the iconoclastic group Puré -characterized as by kitsch, junk art, confusion between boundaries of artistic individualities and, above all, the treatment of themes directly associated with the daily and popular life of Havana at the time- broke in into Havana cultural scene.
Janet Batet
Ciro is a subject obsessed with ‘floating imaginaries,’ a collector of iconographies and style, a usurper and a belligerent. His work amounts to a multifaceted cosmos of infinite references that, like in cinema, are coupled and overlapped in the unique text, and ultimately original. A text that, by force, reveals itself as the “container” of a cosmos, of a totality that escapes all constriction and any reductionism.
Andrés Isaac Santana
Many of Ciro Quintana’s works constitute an intermediary category, semi-painting, semi-sculpture (or neither painting nor sculpture) and make up a specific object. Whatever its date of creation, one of his works can be identified immediately; it is inscribed in its time as a kind of visual synthesis of the scope of modernity.
Francois Vallée
In his tapestry-paintings of strident colors, it is undeniable that Ciro overturns a narrative that denies prose and offers in exchange, parables in abundance, strafing with metaphors and exhibitionist accumulations—a tribute to Horror Vacui—, collisions of references promoting a discourse where ideological nostalgia, which intends to teach morally, is the perfect excuse for Ciro to paint.
Aldo Menéndez
