Reynerio Tamayo

SIDA Vs. Cultura

Watercolor on cardboard, 43.8 x 54.5 cm.


  • Reynerio Tamayo is a post-vanguardist Cuban artist who, guided by his own instinct, without any kind of prejudice, offers us his national-contemporary world, commented with his peculiar Culteran humor.
  • La poética visual de la pintura de Reynerio Tamayo se despliega con la virtuosa espontaneidad y dominio de los recursos plásticos de un creador consagrado. Su obra pictórica es un paradigmático ejemplo de cómo hacer un uso posmoderno del medio pintura, en la variante de la estética del reciclaje y el recurso de la intertextualidad de manera explícita e intencional.
  • By using the most diverse techniques: aquarelle, drawing, engraving, illustration, poster, ceramic, painting and installations; Tamayo walks along a way that he mixes by a fusion of themes like portraits, landscapes, still life productions, erotic paintings and caricatures.

Reynerio Tamayo has accustomed us to this confusion, that he is today a humorist, tomorrow a storyteller, and the next day a poster designer. To top everything, all his work appears with a suspicious apocryphal taste, a pulling-the-leg slanting that finally sat him at the best seats among present-day humorists […].

[…] We could ask ourselves, is Tamayo really a storyteller? As many characteristics get him closer, as get him farther from that word. Let’s see. Reyneiro is an excellent painter; his works are finely elaborated, which has worth a just comparison of him with Middle Ages’ miniaturists or illuminators. His exquisite line, his way of handling colors, the unique choosing of backgrounds that sometimes assume and important conceptual role, make Tamayo become a magnificent candidate for an odd bug of our graphic media. On the other hand, he has made ostensible his real vocation for the narrative. Give me a piece of paper and I will tell you about the world. Be it on cardboard, celluloid or ceramic, Tamayo always has to do with some story, generally, his own.

These two tendencies (to draw and to tell) make him the person most similar to a storyteller. Leaning in his accustomed profusion of details, this artist is capable of telling us in only one vignette any meticulous anecdote, the juicy fragment of a narration with a beginning and an ending we can always imagine, thanks to the prodigious suggestive power that he activates. This phenomenon is seen multiplied when he makes use of a sequence of pictures, each one charged with a particular world, where each element has its weight, from the characters to the backgrounds, chosen not at all randomly […].

[…] The spreading out of all these skills should suffice us to conclude that, indeed, Tamayo is a storyteller with his entire beard –although his beardless face makes you think anything else. He is a real storyteller, a graphical-narration artist. But there are still some unknowns to be cleared up. First, Tamayo is not an editorial-minded storyteller. His works (at least up to now) have to be found in galleries or museums, not in magazines or comic strip books, and their workmanship entirely correspond with the destiny of expositions […].

[…] A searcher of reality that makes use of anything that comes to hand to place truth before our eyes. And that is the biggest virtue of storyteller Tamayo: the careful cultivation of a seed suddenly turned into an unexpected mine of pleasure. 1

 

1. Enrique Hernández Pascual, “Tamayo: la historieta es de quien la trabaja,” El orgasmo es de quien lo trabaja (Catalogue, Havana: Centro Cultural Cinematográfico Yara, 1992).