HIT PARADE in Villa Manuela

Havana: All throughout the month of May, Cuban artist Juan Moreira will be exposing Hit Parade at the Villa Manuela Gallery of Cuba’s League of Writers and Artists (UNEAC). The exhibit consists of ten engraved canvases made out of photographs taken by Moreira himself and handpicked by curator David Mateo based on the singularity, graphic impact and allegoric correlation the pieces convey in terms of both epochs and times.

The curatorship has expressed in the introductory text written by David Mateo that “this exhibition has been conceived to showcase unpublished evidence of Juan Moreira’s artistic background in the field of publicity graphics since the late 1950s, an experience that exerted a decisive influence on the conformation and the formation of his pictorial work, mainly with well-known series as Realismo mágico and Lo erótico organico.”

These are images, taken from a much bigger group the artist still keeps in his studio, designed to give spectators some clear and determinant clues on the cultural, ideological and iconographic environment in which they were all born and in which the basic traces of drawing and painting were maturing in Juan Moreira’s work. But above all, it pursues the intention of painting a picture of that time in which some basic devices of his methodology were whipped into shape, especially in terms of figurative treatment, the use of chiaroscuros and plain tones, the utilization of large formats and the application of the composite design.”

The idea behind this project –Mateo explains- came into being during the artist’s participation in a collective exhibit at the Miramar Trade Center organized last year by Air France and in which one of his pieces triggered tremendous interest, surprise and curiosity among attendees. The artwork is a small-scale canvas he painted for an advertising company back in 1957. This event revealed some new information, a new visual conjecture for the analysis of his artistic evolution and helped put his name back on the historic list of plastic artists linked to publicity and commercial graphics. Those ties have swayed between direct practice of the trade all the way to the strategic re-assimilation of certain tricks and methodologies that hail straight from that form of expression.