Agustín Bejarano

Untitled, from the series Los ritos del silencio, 2010

Mixed media and resin, 44 x 81 cm.


  • “Esa fue nuestra culpa, la de haber olvidado que la tierra escondía su vejez entre flores”. Agustín Bejarano. La soledad como icono en la plástica cubana contemporánea.
  • Bejarano va cimentando todo un universo de símbolos y maneras singulares que ya se tornan distintivas en el panorama del arte cubano contemporáneo.
  • Es una serie tan vasta, tan plena, tan bien resuelta plásticamente, de una serenidad interior tan madura, que difícilmente pueda superarse en los trabajos por venir.
  • It is in the poetic imagery of the virtuous contemporary painter Agustín Bejarano that Cuban landscape painting reaches its most lyrical zenith.
  • Cuban painting become noticeable internationally at the hands of several artists like Wifredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, Mario Carreño, Victor Manuel and now at the hand of our brilliant painter Agustín Bejarano.

Time simulates having stopped and it weighs. The restlessness provokes an oppression in the chest as if one could not reach air to breathe. The door in from of me has its own flesh. One discovers its skins in the trenches left by the fractured painting, in those pieces about to fall off, about to jump on me. That door, which perhaps was once white, opens. A trace of breeze takes me to see The Rites of Silence […]. 1

[…] These landscape of his, which are born of unquestionably abstract depths, expand in sepias, sienna, ochre in their most mythical intensities, whites of abundant foggy density and one or another warm touch of synthetic orange or pale rose. They emerge in the material, in more moderated crazings and the effects of resin pasted on the canvas surfaces; suggestive to the hand as if they were a different writing made more for the touch of the soul than for the distraction of the eyes, together with other zones worn down by the bite of time, as impartial witness of nature and human essence […]. 2

 

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

2. Caridad Blanco, “Agustín Bejarano, The rain of days,” in Agustín Bejarano, Obras 1987 – 2000 (Havana: Artecubano Ediciones, 2006), 165.