Carlos Quintana

The painting is cooked in the arrivals of the fabric, it burns out, and it loses its consistency. The painting loses its fluidity, it is just a chemical reaction, it is just a ploy. That is the world which has emerged from a coup in which oxygen has been covered of pasty, vibrant, chromatic odors, and the matter has dislocated the altarpiece of the symbols and the waist of the power. And things are renewed, uncertain, unnamed and non-possessed.

Painting is for Carlos Quintana the accurate way for expressing the innate state of the world. Things do not conform to the violently scheduled ups and downs of the perfidious logic that man has entitled “reason.” He visits history, collective memory, the great epic tales, the fanciful and even the enigmatic ones; he deletes referential narrative components off them. He tears the symbolic dimension, the exact reference out of them, and then he destroys the ideological component that usually invades images in these lands. A mystical being is the protagonist of his scenes, and anonymity is fixed to its condition. It comes from an unknown country, from a vague time, from a new race. It is a delirium.

Being self-taught, Quintana has contributed to the development of a renewed figuration and to very particular signs: large formats, incisive and synthetic drawing, minimal artistic conception, lucidity of pure color. Vacuum is threatening, and silence is, without any doubt, invasive.

We are victims for a while of his formal discussions. And it is because they expel a seduction that goes beyond the usual perceptive indices. They produce a visceral desire, an uncontrolled anxiety without precedent. Perhaps they are manifestations of our brain structures, excited by so great a vastness, prompted to create knowledge, to generate food and energy. Perhaps they are evidences of their imminent inability for Gnostic domain. Perhaps it is the triumph of sensibility over the rationality, or maybe it is an act of paranoia and lack of control.

Never mind the narration of these fantastic scenes that Quintana brings us from so far away. The narrative components were beheaded and their fragments are scattered around the canvas. At the end of everything, the essence of his artistic attempts is purposeful after the perception: every scene of Quintana reveals our inability to feel rather than see.



  • Carlos Quintana es uno de esos grandes pintores que heredaron el poder de hacer arte de la excelencia al poner la mano sobre la tela.
  • De un alto reconocimiento tanto nacional como internacional, la poética pictórica desarrollada por Carlos Quintana es una de las más originales y sui géneris de su generación.
  • Carlos Quintana’s work is defined from his contemporaries from the extent to which he is able to visualize and establish a creative dialogue within his mind through the paintwork. Carlos Quintana has a powerful painting style and whit the faith of a Picasso he squashes the painting under the weight of destructions.
  • Carlos Quintana’s artworks depicting in vibrant colours and with loose brush strokes, and of which we feel in part nostalgic, in part intrigued, and in part overcome with awe in the face of such mastery of skill in the realization of his inner workings.
  • Dotado por la magia de la excelencia, Carlos Quintana forma parte de la categoría de los independientes irreductibles, de los francotiradores inclasificables que no aprendieron la pintura en escuelas de bellas artes o en academias sino casi por azar.
  • Hacia 1990 comenzaron a conocerse sus obras como pintor y los personajes suyos nacidos en los comics, pasaron a ser protagonistas en sus piezas al óleo.
  • The Cuban painter Carlos Quintana plays with the beating motion, the uncompleted spasm that he, as well as few like him, can outline in one succession, like someone putting the finishing touches on a drama so the next one can begin.
  • Cuban painter Carlos Quintana utilizes colour like a tool to expand on or unravel and idea, pursuing laconic zones of transparency from most painful darkness of the poet to the poetic resolution that makes you forever love a balance and harmonious work.
  • Con enorme sinceridad poética, Quintana da a luz cuerpos que tienen su lugar natural en los vértigos de su propia cabeza. Si el pintor “trabaja a tientas” es porque necesita el tacto de lo que no puede perderse nunca (la memoria de la infancia), en última instancia, esos cuerpos que producen pasmo están atravesados por la ternura. El que habla de lo que ama puede, fácilmente, perder la cabeza.
  • Si algo hace pregnancia inmediata de la obra de Quintana, amor a primera vista, son sus cromatismos; mejor dicho, es el contraste que provocan sus colores iridiscentes, impuros pero luminosos, con el universo atormentado del artista que hace catarsis en el lienzo.
  • Pintura y dibujo son al mismo tiempo fundamento y pretexto, límite y prolongación. Sus pinturas son interminables telones de alguna obra que se ejecuta en escena; sus exquisitas líneas, la maestría en el uso de los recursos del color, ese dibujo como elemento central donde no se enmascaran las huellas del proceso, solo son subterfugios, escaramuzas para atraparnos e inmiscuirnos en la engañosa madeja de sus redes.
  • Carlos Quintana, uno de los pintores más sui generis de la plástica cubana contemporánea.
  • Without question, Carlos Quintana is one of Cuba’s mighty painters of all time. He got his plenty maturity and consecration as one of the most important artist during the convulse exodus experimented by Cuban art in the decade of 90s.
  • Without question, the highly acclaimed painter Carlos Quintana is one of the main protagonists of the current Cuban contemporary plastic arts.
  • Contemporary artist Carlos Quintana’s sensibility is signaled by the inclusiveness inherent to post-modernity. The nature of his paintings is almost always confusing, and they represent actions that are not to be explained but only sensed.
  • Para Carlos Quintana la pintura es por encima de todo pintura, y el acto de pintar, su vida. La pintura de Carlos Quintana es ante todo gesto, hálito, impulso vital.
  • As a successful imagemaker, Carlos Quintana is one of those great painters whom inherited the power of making art of Excellency.
  • An artist will highlight among the best ones in Cuban art history: Carlos Quintana, a painter who inherited the power of making art of Excellency.