14 September-19 October 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, 14 September, 6-8PM
Cuban painter and sculptor Carlos Estévez’ solo show of new works, “Living Apart Together”, includes large paintings and intricate sculptures that explore the human psyche with metaphoric imagery and thoughtful witticism.
Estévez is from the generation of Cuban artists and intellectuals who, emerging in the 1990s, developed a sense of connectedness to the world outside of Cuba where social, political and geographic boundaries do not exist compared to the restricted freedoms on the island. Free to develop a symbolic language of his own, Estévez uses images from the physical world to convey his thoughts on isolation and solitude. Present are his trademark mechanical figures: hybrids of man and nature, combined with elements of music, marionettes, architecture and telephones. His interest in alchemy and the paradoxical nature of man are evident in this new series illustrating the divergences that derail us from our higher self. He writes, “The history of human beings is a grand paradox. The development of technologies, the “progress” and evolution is disproportionate to the development of individual thought and spirituality. He goes on to state that, “…the magic of art is in its capacity to communicate from the most remote spaces of the interior world of the artist to the most intricate places in the soul of the spectator.”
Estévez investigates the study of communication with a series of works featuring rotary dial phones. In the sculpture Balanced Approach, he combines an elaborate rigging of a metal weight scale with a plated phone base suggesting the value of weighing ones words. Long Distance Relationships is a large painting featuring 14 telephones of different styles with human parts representing the modern phenomenon of isolation in a social media and device driven world. He writes of this schism, “My paintings attempt to represent this chaos: the absurdity of life, the lack of communication, the distance between humans.” It is this type of observation that motivates Estévez to delve into his world of symbols and create a visual testimonial to the incongruities of life in a modern age.
Carlos Estévez’s work may be found in numerous museum and public collections in Cuba, Mexico, France, Germany, Brazil, and throughout the United States.
INFORMATION
Couturier Gallery
166 North La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90036 USA
(323) 933-5557
Hours:
Tuesday-Saturday, 11AM-5PM
Image:
Long Distance Relationships
by Carlos Estévez
oil, watercolour pencil on canvas
2013
Image courtesy of Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles