Roberto Diago Querol Hall: artistic event of the visual arts

Reviewing each program, one moves to significant names and works, which reaffirmed the potential of Matanzas visual arts.

El Diago, as it is called, is a space that also encourages exchange and confrontation between creators and where the Provincial Prize for Plastic Arts is awarded, which on this occasion went to the prominent photographer Ramón Pacheco Salazar.

Somehow I missed the physical presence of creators like Agustín Drake or Rolando Estévez, to whom homage was paid in two ways. To the first, with the delivery of a prize from the “Lolo” gallery, which went to the young Amanda Rodríguez Leyva; while the second was dedicated to the event as a way of signifying his artistic transcendence as a painter, graphic and stage designer, promoter, teacher and notable creator of performance.

With a competitive nature, as on other occasions, and after curatorial work, the Salon, with a sample of 23 creators and a set of 26 works of painting, engraving, photography and sculpture, awarded prizes from the jury, made up of Sergio Roque , Helga Montalván and Armando Abel Rodríguez, especially in the Acquisition and Promotion categories. In addition, prizes were awarded by Uneac, the Cultural Assets Fund, the ACAA and the Genesis gallery.

He is grateful to discover, on a tour of the Salon, the presence of young artists, with works that stand out for their technical results, for the fusion of resources and their aesthetic rigor, for the freshness of their proposals and the validation of a generation that is imposes, as is the case of some of the award-winning artists and works by Susana (Gío) Fernández and Liliana Fuste.

In the first, at only 18 years old, a fine art-style photographic triptych stands out, which reflects an elaborate aesthetic work, photographic manipulation and shows a mastery of appropriation and reinvention of works by prominent artists, as well as the excellent ability to recreate the psychology, the delicacy of the costumes and the scenery offered by the atmosphere, the context, a Brechtian-style distancing, which causes -as spectators- the act of immersing themselves in the successful visual effect, as the jury highlighted, in other Spaces and Times, in which the work of Rubens, Vermeer and Rembrandt emerges, recreating a reality that metamorphoses with imagination.

Winner last year of the award in the Acquisition section, this year Liliana Fuste was awarded in the promotion category.

His piece Aguru tente onu reinvents the iconography of syncretic cults and in it there is a subtle influence of the engraver Belkis Ayón, but above all, of the personal appropriation of the syncretic, with an elaborate, suggestive technique, with overlapping signs and they create a powerful imagery, in which scenes and characters come together, which take us to the intricate codes of Afro-Cuban spirituality and to a space of theatricality.

Babujal, by Stéfany Fernández, was also recognized with a mention. Lithograph on craff paper, his refined technique draws attention, which addresses the mythological, with a very special connection with the contemporary.

With two collateral prizes, the one from the Museum of Art and the one from the Cultural Assets Fund, Lázaro Infante, in Ciudadano Modelo, oil on canvas, offers with impeccable technique and synthesis in speech a metaphor that moves between the irony of the signs , which offer multiple readings and a poetic allusion of ideological and social connotation.

Among the other collateral prizes, the work of the photographer Ernesto Cruz Hernández offers us two suggestive images that denote the search of the artist who moves away from certain prevailing stereotypes, not only in photographic works, to capture us from the lyrical, the imaginative and the reflective. of your proposal.

Hemorrhage, by Lorenzo Prieto, recognized by the Cultural Assets Fund, humanizes architecture and with the technique of acrylic on canvas and the “wounds-slashes” in the material used, alerts, denounces, dramatizes the destruction of the heritage of any city, a cry of despair, in which the character (that’s what he turns the buildings into), inanimate, but alive, bleeds to death and since its creation reveals pain and agony to us.

Other winners of collateral prizes, in addition to those already mentioned, were the artists Yubiel Sánchez Ruiz, Osniel Yoel Mella García, among others.

From the guest artist, Adrián Gómez Sancho, in La memoria asombrada are the obsessions of the artist, with a consolidated poetics, with a lyrical and conceptual imagery that places him among one of our most significant artists.

Works by Eddy Hernández, who combines the abstract with the objectual, producing within a Christian mysticism, transgressed by the creator’s perspective, suggestive, open, dynamited readings, the same is the case with artists like Erick González Triana, who goes through patriotic symbolism, by objects, with a metaphorical dimension.