Raúl Proenza
Raúl Proenza (b. Miami, U.S.A. 1959) Proenza grew up in Cuba and graduated 1978 from the national art academic San Alejandro in Havana. Upon graduation, he was sent to perform his social service to the eastern provinces where he worked as a professor of drawing and painting at the elementary school of art in Manzanillo, there he participates in several exhibitions. In the 1980 exodus, he arrives in the United States and establishes himself in New York City where he participates in several collective exhibitions in several Galleries and some personal samples, in 1984 he moves to Los Angeles, there he makes other exhibitions. He currently lives in Miami, Florida, US.
“His art is an activity that is related to the unspeakable, with the unstable that breaks with a museum history, where he evades to decipher the public something incomprehensible or inaccessible to his palate. In his imagination there is movement, as Baudelaire told Inres, or there are “magnets for the eye”, in Vasari’s phrase, which radiate into the space around them. Proenza imposes himself on the observer before he knows the subject, and gains it by his art, not by his thematic servitude, by resorting to the transcendence of the object-for-him and no longer the description of the object-in-itself. This formal liberation did not mean the absence of formal structure, but its displacement from the more or less faithful representation of the outer world to color; In this way, its plastic becomes autonomous, with its own laws, based on the hierarchy and color gradation, through which it generates a new reality, contained in each of its fabrics”. In this way the historian Juan Felipe Benemelis describes it.
Raul Proenza, Penolope, 2017, mix media, 30x30."