Carlos Quintana

Adiós felicidad, 2008

Mixed media on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.


  • Del fondo líquido del lienzo surge el pulso de la figura, las manchas dan paso a la contundencia de las pasiones humanas: lo lúdico y el desgarro de la soledad pueden ir juntos.
  • 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.
  • Desde la profundidad brumosa de su gracia primera, mancha, desvirgada desfloración ante el lienzo que emerge de a poco al plano esencial.
  • 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.
  • Behind a pair of hands and a moistly dripping, watchful sex-eye lives a dangerous ability to gracefully ensnare a story told by the collector.
  • Carlos Quintana es un artista intuitivo, temperamental, con un estilo aparentemente naif dado el desenfado y la espontaneidad que caracteriza su trazo, más ese estilo es el resultado de una refinada técnica y de un gran oficio pictórico.

Good-bye Happiness

From February 6th to March 14th 2009, Galería Habana hosted the personal exhibition Ocho (Eight) by Cuban artist Carlos Quintana. With this suggestive title, fruit of the eastern philosophical influence assimilated in his work, various big-format pieces representative of the author were exhibited together. Two of them, Esto hasta se come (This can be even eaten) and Adiós felicidad (Good-bye happiness) –200 x 200 cm–, were acquired by collector José Busto and presented to the audience again in the group exhibition organized with motive of the opening of the independent project Avistamientos (Gallery of Contemporary Cuban Art) during the 11th Havana Biennial.  

Adiós felicidad is Quintana’s typical work that needs little to emerge. Minimalist in terms of use of expressive resources, it exemplifies that less is more, is freedom, and that nothing can be all. From the virgin canvas, a figure with an impassive countenance emerges, incarnating the subtle metaphor of the exodus, of the constant and eternal departure of the people who have once wandered by our lives. From the lived or felt experience, Carlos Quintana perpetuates the sublime farewell of a mood that is essentially transitory, leaving us the taste, or heartaches, produced by the fact that nothing can be done. Irremediably subjected by the immanent strength of his art, we keep on trying to rationalize what is illogical and enigmatic in the face, of a man on a horse, who looks back, but ahead. It is not actually about understanding, but about feeling. 

–Ariadna Cabrera