Agustín Bejarano

Untitled, from the series Culto, 2015

Mixed media on canvas, 140 x 200 cm.


  • There is plenitude but not certainty, opening but not end in the grand artist that Agustín Bejarano has come to be.
  • Bejarano preferred a type of art that had made Wifredo Lam immense, or better said, that had taken him to the heights of Cuban art of all times: the fact that he had transcended the circumstantial dimension and the test of a trans-cultural art that tried to measure, to appreciate, to enjoy the world’s organic unity as basic principle of existence. It is in the poetic imagery of this preeminent artist that Cuban landscape painting reaches its most lyrical.
  • This excellent painter that Bejarano is, wields a reality not to be found anywhere, not even in remote or elusive form.
  • This painter wields a reality not to be found anywhere, not even in remote or elusive form. Bejarano is so much a great draftsman of the island, that he has given birth to his more independent and uncontaminated world, one that he is able to luminously capture in his work.

[…] This ecumenical man that Agustín Bejarano has decided to show in his abandonment has crossed and exceeded his own limits through prayer, request and meditation while silence is reiterated as echo. Something intense and unmentionable arrives, falls, and invades with its density the place reserved to that voice, which would desperately like to be heard. These are the revelations toward which silence drives us. A strong rainfall may arrive, but time is something else. A fine drizzle is present in the passing of time. Time waits impassive. The weight is inside the man’s chest, suffocating him; nothing breaks it, nothing free it; a hat is his only protection. Man yesterday, today. Always under the eternal rain of days.1

 

1. Caridad Blanco, “Agustín Bejarano, The rain of days,” in Agustín Bejarano, Obras 1987 – 2000 (Havana: Artecubano Ediciones, 2006), 167.