Javier Dueñas, Provincial Plastic Arts Award for Life’s Work (+ audio and photos).

The work of Javier Dueñas is an essential reference of the visual arts on the island. From the municipality of Perico, he has put his voice on the lips of all Cubans, he has opened his viewers’ eyes and has returned to us the daily realities, the dilemmas that accompany us, converted into works of art.

Javier Dueñas’ words of gratitude were the words of Javier Dueñas when he received this March 6th, the date on which the World Day of Plastic Arts is celebrated, the provincial award for the work of life, at the Esquerré Gallery in the city of Matanzas.

Photographer Ramon Pacheco Salazar, winner of the Provincial Plastic Arts Award in the previous edition, valued Dueñas’ creation as a brilliant work, full of poetry and an incalculable imaginary, whose selection to receive the important recognition, he said, is more than deserved because of what his work represents for Cuban contemporary art.

Nearly thirty works, including paintings and drawings, many of them serialized, in a variety of formats, supports and techniques, make up the exhibition Toda una isla en mí, which was inaugurated on the occasion of the delivery, with a selection of pieces by the artist that cover a time span of approximately three decades of professional development.

In the pieces, according to the valuations of the specialist Vilma Roque Espinosa in the words to the catalog, stands out his extraordinary charisma for the figurative speech where he treasures the iconographic imaginary of our people, personifying through identity elements, values and essences of Cuban life, in which he reflects the urgencies of subsistence such as land, family, work, home and his environment, the certainties and uncertainties, the successes and failures of everyday life, involving his critical, dreamlike and biting vision of the immediate social context.

The work of Javier Dueñas is an essential reference of the visual arts on the island. From the municipality of Perico, he has put his voice on the lips of all Cubans, he has opened his viewers’ eyes and returned to us the daily realities, the dilemmas that accompany us, converted into works of art.

While enjoying the impeccable curatorship that allows to appreciate a part of the prolific work of the creator, he confessed to feel satisfied and happy. Genesis Gallery, the Provincial Directorate of Culture and the Cultural Heritage Fund joined in the congratulations with works by artists Serhio Roque and Adrian Gomez Sancho.

They all recognized and endorsed the considerations of Vilma Roque when she said that the talent and creative capacity of Javier Dueñas coexist with the honesty of his visual universe, where the reflective gaze before the historical past, transcends the limit of the subtle to the daring of his discernment, in faithful expression of his responsibility and commitment as an artist.

Written by Jessica Mesa Duarte.