Agustín Bejarano

Internauta II, from the series Los ritos del silencio, 2016

Mixed media on canvas, 142 x 142 cm.


  • As if they had come out of a painting by Goya, Bejarano’s characters are bewildered and apocalyptic, titanic and colossal.
  • Heredero de la neofiguración expresionista, Agustín Bejarano refleja en sus obras las contradicciones del hombre contemporáneo, sus conflictos y crisis más profundas.
  • Heredero de la neofiguración expresionista, Agustín Bejarano refleja en sus obras las contradicciones del hombre contemporáneo, sus conflictos y crisis más profundas.
  • Agustín Bejarano is one of the most notorious and skillful contemporary painters worldwide.
  • In the poetics of Bejarano there has always been a cosmic essence that founded something that penetrated the totality without attempting to describe it.
  • Tan inmenso como el de Wifredo Lam, cumbre del arte cubano de todos los tiempos, el arte de Bejarano trata de entender la organicidad del mundo como principio de existencia. La pericia del edificio semiótico que sostiene a cada obra es el quid del éxito de este artista y pintor contemporáneo.
  • Agustín Bejarano es un poeta que escribe con colores, un cronista de su tiempo y su historia, un hacedor de utopías, un equilibrista que no cae. Como salidos de una pintura de Goya, sus personajes son descentrados y apocalípticos, titánicos y colosales.
  • Las tonalidades son sobrias casi carentes de vitalidad, pero justo ahí reside la belleza de la obra, en profesar una verdad sin artificios.

Unearthing Truths

Changes are always complex for human beings, whether they are changes of space, time, state… Transformations never achieve such radicalism; in the best case they become the mix of what they were and what it is obtained as a new result, between the aged and the future. On that intermediate place, where doubt and certainty live, Agustín Bejarano’s characters are located. Right in that space appears his Internauta II, a little man who flies over the clouds and seems to reach the cosmos. It is a dreamy person who tries to break the walls, jump over the barriers of impossibility and catch chimeras. For that reason the painter, who works his craft on the canvas, who stretches it and imprisons it, draws it in that way. It is a copy of his being, it is his very essence and many others’; it is the existence and condition of perennial crisis what he shows, it is only important to learn how to see beyond what the human eye perceives. Bejarano’s artworks must be read without taboos, without mediating prejudices, with a pristine and sincere thought; it is the only way of understanding his universe, which is at the same time, our universe.

Internauta II leaves no time to calm, his message is revealed to us free from bondages, he is an individual does not find his space but who lives in the constant search for it. It is the struggle of man for fighting against the routine imposed by the passing of life, the tireless attempt for transgressing the limits of the established balance. It causes the desolation that appears in the artwork and wallows between the dust and the debris. Again his scenario is cold and distressing, based on the use of ochre shades interwoven with the sometimes evoked white hue, and the black tone that comprises all. His surfaces crack again, but this time is not evident, since the painter did not leave the remains of the acrylic and spatula on the fabric; he preferred to represent it clean and flat, perhaps because this space demanded it so.

The circle is not to be seen any more in the very shape of the mount, however it appears drawn on the canvas and configures it and orients it. The circumference is not a simple compositional scheme for Bejarano, is more than that, it is a recurring and necessary sign. The circle is the metaphor for the concept of cycle, is the representation of a path whose starting point always comes back again, only that the repetition becomes different, it assumes other nuances and meanings. Agustín Bejarano is a poet who writes with colors, a chronicler of his time and his history, a maker of utopias, a balancing performer who does not fall.

–Claudia Pérez