GAY GARCÍA

Enrique GAY GARCÍA (b. 1928, Santiago de Cuba):

A painter and sculptor, Gay Garcia’s work – whether abstract or figurative – is generally balanced and technically controlled. “I don’t like ‘torment’ in art,” he has said. His work was selected for the VI and VII Sao Paolo biennials and the exhibitions Hispanic‑American Artists of the United States at the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in Washington, D.C.Recent Developments in Latin American Drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago, Outside Cuba and Expresiones Hispanas 88/89, the Coors National Hispanic Art Exhibition, among others. He was the subject of reporter Ana Azcuy’s 1978 documentary Gay García Casting Bronze. His work is in the permanent collections the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in Washington, D.C., the Miami-Dade Public Library and the Vermont Academy, among others. His sculpture of Father Félix Varela is at the San Carlos Institute in Key West. Gay García studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana, the Instituto Politécnico in Mexico City, the Art Institute in Venice and the University of Perugia. (Cintas for art, 1983-84).

According to Ricardo Pau-Llosa , few contemporary artists have delved into the chthonic grounding of our psyches with the courage, directness, and originality of Gay Garcia.

“In sculptures, paintings, prints, and tapestry, his vision of the tension that is our home and basis for our identity – the tension between earth and freedom, between time and hope – has never wavered. Garcia has never advanced a sanguine resolution of this tension. Through myriad – subtle images, textures and gestures, Garcia's focus and message have been constant; the earth-time-governed life-world, precarious stage we share with other subjectivities, is already half the child of our hope, half the substance of all desire to escape it. Garcia's works reiterate a single passionate theme: we do not want to escape the earthbound so much as we aspire to make it last forever. Flesh is the only context we know, so it is unnatural to desire to escape it. Death is what we want to shed. Art is the clearest expression of this desire, even clearer than religion. Wings are one of Garcia's most important recurring motives of the last decade. They are the central image around which the theme of freedom turns in the sculptures and paintings”.

“Garcia's art dramatizes how creative power and reflection, and on a broader scale how action and matter, are one and the same. No Latin American since Matta can rival Garcia's dramatization of the volcanic order of the imagination. The inspiration lies, precisely, in the paradox, the fiery matrix has laws and structure.”