PRESS

 “My images result from what has already been told, when the sense of reality has been overcome and what remains is to escape, but at the same time to illustrate this ephemeral and convulsive time that I have had to live.” This statement by Abisay Puentes is the best reflection of his painting: an open work, permeated by symbols, keys; translated into introspective landscapes where the individual threatens to get lost. His painting-discursive logic induces a state of permanent uncertainty...

Andrea: Well Abisay, this art exhibition entails a metaphor relating to the loss of innocence, yes? But is there a narrative goal, an element of theatrical construction, or narrative. Could you please talk a little about this construction?

Abisay: Yes, I had started in 2001 with a series of paintings titled Rito Gular. This series is followed by others like Liturgia Impenitente, a succession of series that follow...

 For Puentes, painting is primary in the seeking of understanding what is beyond the everyday. Ideas and questions about why humans continue to hurt each other across time and place emerge in the painterly process. Graduations and transitions of rich and deep colors and a purposeful distortion of human forms evoke the anxiety of transcendence and unresolved conflict...

 Still when him same he admits not to want that they classify it, for Abisay Puentes it will be very difficult to get rid of the "posmedieval" qualification -that the critical Jorge R. Bermúdez coined to define to a current that took off inside the plastic one Cuban in last decade - ...

The melding of the arts found the works Puentes creates forms part of a trajectory of creative possibilities that originated in the mid-Twentieth Century, with Fluxus, an intermedia artistic movement from which Contemporary, international art springs. For Cuban-born Abisay Puentes, who now lives in Syracuse, New York, the freedom provided by the foundational concepts of Fluxus are a gateway to his exploration of his cosmological vision of existence. As it is in the mixed media creative expression...

The new show Vistas Cubanas presents works by more than a dozen artists, including several who live in Cuba and a quartet who grew up in Cuba, emigrated to the United States and now live in Syracuse...

 Justo ahora, que los jóvenes artistas e intelectuales cubanos afirman un valor único y exhiben una poderosa musculatura de pensamiento activo que remueve los cimientos del sistema totalitario y dictatorial en el que viven, no puedo, aunque quiera, ensayar una mirada crítica sobre la obra de otro hijo de Guillermo Tell que se cansó de la manzana en la cabeza, sin pensar y asociar la angustia consumada en ella con la dimensión cultural y política de ese gesto de desobediencia civil que me ha tenido en vilo y expectante por cinco días...

 Entre las actuales circunstancias y su obra se da, de por sí, una suerte de maridaje de relaciones conflictivas y alusivas que no podemos ignorar. Sin embargo, ella es, por otra parte, una poderosa alegoría de un mundo tan concreto como abstracto, tan tangible como evanescente, tan real como salido de la ficción y de sus obsesiones...