Agustín Bejarano

[…] Bejarano’s poetic, profusely experimental, has avoided the restriction to certain styles; with a live interest in the renewal of topics profusely handle in the history of art, as happened with his taste for portrait in the series Cabezas mágicas. It left behind the sensuality shown in Anunciación, where the taste for contrast had become evident in the exaltation of the corporeity of figures of precise anatomy. The “portrayed” characters integrated with their austere environments, and although at times they were represented up to the torso and even in their full body, conceptually, from the title of the series, the symbolic reference concerning the heads was focusing them in a cult to all that is generated by thought, to the strength and powers of the mind, and also to its condition –a venerable one– of receptacle of spiritual matters, to establish an analogy with Plato’s idea that the human head is the image of the world.

There was a refusal to any physical resemblance, to that precise construction claimed by some for the portrait. Canvas and acrylic were respectively space and technical instrument for his free game of blurring classic morphologies and praising the epics of daily life –a daily life whose plainness and fugacity builds the epic of the common man. There was space here for farewells, expectancy, injuries and also for savageness, wreckage and metamorphoses. The artist thus worked out the scheme of events and at the same time of the memory from the point of view of the individual, and delivered to us an outline of his own experience through many of the margined beings of the great discourse of history.

The exhibition Cabezas mágicas, presented at the Havana Club Foundation in Havana, was a sort of resurrection of the portrait topic –abstracted portraits in the represented invoked types; abstractions of a generic kind present in Tejedora de mano, Pescador and Retrato de muchacha, which presented fictional faces that recreated the anonymous and, at the same time, multiple figures of the streets […]. ¹

1. Caridad Blanco, “Agustín Bejarano, The rain of days,” in Agustín Bejarano, Obras 1987 – 2000 (Havana: Artecubano Ediciones, 2006), 163.