Agustín Bejarano

Culto, 2011

Mixed media on canvas, 50 x 60 cm.


  • Los personajes de Bejarano, en el entorno en que son colocados, son dueños de un silencio que busca comprender el hilo secreto de sus vidas puestas al límite, de manera que puedan dejar de ser pasivos actores de un destino y convertirse en amos de las riendas de sus propias vidas.

[…] In the work of Agustín Bejarano, men and places converge in the infiniteness of nature that is more symbolic than naturalist and in addition vast, plentiful in its luminous effects or in the densities of its darkness. The act of silence is the rite, and the universe, its landscape. Its copulation makes everything overflow, annulling the emptiness and the mind of those who remain silent. It becomes a window between the outside and the inside. At that very moment, the inner beast that one time has possessed us is defeated […]. 1

[…] The landscape has always been a complementary resource in the work of Agustín Bejarano. Ha has reinserted it at his convenience in his work, like he did with some codes and imageries of universal painting from the Renaissance to our days. It is the logical behavior of a daring re-contextual artist, of a clear exponent of that “American-born postmodernism” that some erroneously assure is in deep slump. However, it is not a conventional assimilation process in which exclusive experiences such as contemplation, ecstasies and the flight are reproduced, but of a reinsertion of the landscape destined to favor the consolidation of a symbol of the circumstantial, the crediting of a supplementary reference to what is permanent or circumstantial.

[…] The recurrence to the landscape is also associated to a philosophy of life and ideas –essential result of his philanthropic education and regional vocation–; a heritage in which the correspondence between man and his circumstances, whether urban or rural, are exalted and privileged; a correspondence that became outstanding since the very beginning of his career and which has done nothing but strengthen and add new arguments. A group of suggestive effects have emerged from the systematic exchange with the landscape genre, defining elements of his work that establish him within that principle of subordination to what is earthly. Among them stand out, because of their capacity of suggestion and scope of expression, the crackled effect as analogy of infertile land, a truly showy and unique resource that has always aroused great curiosity among the spectators […]. 2

 

1. Caridad Blanco, “Agustín Bejarano, The rain of days,” in Agustín Bejarano, Obras 1987 – 2000 (Havana: Artecubano Ediciones, 2006), 166.

2. David Mateo, “Evasion and permanence,” Landscape (Catalogue, Havana: Galería Habana, 2010).