The sensual beauty in the brushes of Ernesto García Peña.

The pictorial work of Matanzas-born Ernesto García Peña stands out for its sensuality and beauty, in strokes interwoven through «vivid connections between nature and metaphor, ocular revelation and poetry, linear morphology and crystalline atmosphere», as visual artist and art critic Manuel López Oliva has expressed before his paintings.

Born on March 6th, 1949 in the town of Unión de Reyes named Sabanilla del Encomendador, today called Juan Gualberto Gómez, in honor of the famous patriot, he breathed from his childhood that imaginative breath that came from a family sensitive to the arts and an exuberant environment, which directed his steps towards the School of Art Instructors until graduating from the Higher Institute of Art, in the Cuban capital, city where he fell in love and settled forever since 54 years ago.

The truth is that he has never lost the link with his homeland; patent has been his collaboration for years with the Ceramics Workshop of Varadero; with the gallery Pedro Esquerré, in the city of Matanzas, where he mounted several exhibitions and offered master classes. It is worth mentioning that the stained-glass windows that adorn the Tropicana cabaret, at whose feet runs the Canímar River, are his work.

Among his best-known canvases are the one dedicated to National Hero José Martí and those of his series entitled El alma desnuda, Lírica insular, Traslúcidos deseos and Confluencias, among more than 60 personal exhibitions, since the first one, entitled A la carga, in 1976, at the Galería Habana.

His paintings are famous, exhibited in the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana; the Museum of Memorial Art of Latin America, Brasilia, Brazil; the Museum of Modern Art Miskolc, Hungary; and the Museum of Art of the Americas, Managua, Nicaragua, in addition to the exhibition of his extensive work by institutions and private collectors from different countries in Cuba, Spain, the United States, Canada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, France, Russia, Prague and Japan.

In recent years he has also been presented in Mexico, where the exhibition Poner o quitar is being announced in these days, at the Taller-estudio 62, in the state of Merida, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, with the exhibition of his latest creations.

Critics’ opinions:

«In García Peña’s artistic production there have been and simultaneously appear key figures of his discourse: horses with riders, representation of naked men and women, wings and creatures of the fauna, subtle acts of carnal love and flaming physiognomies integrated into the-is.»

«Ernesto García Peña is one of the most internationally renowned Cuban painters of today. Ascribed to the informalist movement.»

«A poet whose graphics are close to the spirit of Art Nouveau, García Peña occupies a peculiar angle of the generation of artists who made his own the epic of the lived environment, which he internalized and then transformed, through translational operations of the imagination into a system of metaphors appropriate to assume equally the intimate theme.»

Congratulations on his 75th anniversary of life and 54th in art to the sublime Unionense painter Ernesto García Peña, so sensual and sensitive, so Cuban in the voluptuous figuration of the national fauna and flora, so patriotic and matancero.

Written by María Elena Bayón.