Agustín Bejarano

Los ritos del silencio CCXXX, 2005

Mixed media on canvas, 105 x 203 cm.


  • A paintbrush by itself rules nothing. It comes alive only through skillful handling. From Cuba’s greatest painter comes this rootsy gem from the golden age of Cuban painting. The exercise of an ever progressive poetic in which the draftsman spirit of Bejarano and his fidelity to abstraction are never absent, even within constant modulations that include having achieved a distinctive language to express himself in engraving and another one to do it in painting.
  • The paintings of Bejarano are surely among our best representations of Cuban art, dwarfing all other.
  • La cualidad que hace de Agustín Bejarano uno de los maestros del arte cubano, y una figura notable del arte latinoamericano contemporáneo, es probablemente el grado de sutileza a que arriba la construcción semiológica de sus piezas más recientes.
  • Bejarano prefería un tipo de arte que había hecho inmenso a Wifredo Lam, o mejor, que lo había llevado a la cumbre del arte cubano de todos los tiempos: el rebasamiento de la circunstancialidad y el ensayo de un arte transcultural que trataba de medir, de agradecer, de gozar la unidad orgánica del mundo como principio básico de la existencia.
  • Una plegaria para acabar de una vez por todas con la indiferencia, eso es lo que nos trasmite la obra Bejarano, Los ritos del silencio

[…] All his pieces are metaphorical yearnings, needs, anguishes, solitudes, dreams and desires. But there are truly humble desires such as satisfying hunger and fearsome desires unleashed by power. In principle, Bejarano does not claim for relief any of these scourges; apparently he only mentions and exposes them to us in the dissection of the spirit of the present, from its very marrow […].

[…] That man leaning on the almost infinite table is not crying of anguish. I prefer to be sure that, with humbleness, that same man leans arms and head and allows the strength of his prayer to grow deep inside. A prayer that no one will ever again turn his head in the face of mockery, abuse, violence, misery or pain of the people of this or any other world. A prayer to end once and for all with indifference. 1

 

1. Caridad Blanco, “Prayer,” Los ritos del silencio, Agustín Bejarano (Catalogue, Havana: Servando Art Gallery, 8th Havana Biennial, 2003), 9-10.