Abstraction as a language within art has never been an evasive element of reality. Its forms are loaded with significance. Suprematism showed that art is beyond state, politics, or religion.  The artist needs to reach that pure feeling that strips their work of all anecdote. For Mondrián, the creative act in the primitive community was essentially abstract, something that became lost as humanity evolved. The way we represent is subject to a naturalism that misrepresents the objectivity of the world we inhabit. Abstract art brought representation into crisis, a subject that reaches society and the ways in which power is expressed, through the conventions that condition the nation state.

Galería Artiz seeks to re-examine one of the most powerful episodes within Cuban art and pay tribute to five artists: Loló Soldevilla, José Angel Rosabal, Sandú Darié, Pedro de Oraá  and Salvador Corratgé, members of the movement known as Diez Pintores Concretos (The Ten Concrete Painters), who became known in Cuba in 1958 and put on their last collective exhibition in 1961. The name of this current exhibition alludes to the Aristotelian concept of telos as the search for an end or the need we have to be in harmony with one another and with the ecosystem of which we are part.  Each of these creators sought redemption through the aesthetic to reach the ethical, during a time of great political turmoil and upheaval.

Jorge Antonio Fernández Torres

Art Critic and Curator

Director of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana