Arturo Montoto: Just Beauty

December 13, 2019

Arturo Montoto is one of the undisputed masters of Cuban visual arts at the moment; he works in his studio-home in Guanabacoa. He is finishing this year at full speed as he will reposition his work in Europe, hand in hand with the Parisian gallery Intemporel. Already this past December several of his pieces were shown at the Luxembourg International Art Fair, represented by the Madrid gallery Gaudí.

Montoto's studio is like a Renaissance workshop. There is painting, sculpture, assistants and disciples devoted to the work. Several dogs roam freely: in the patio someone cuts a branch broken off by the wind from a fruit tree, in the kitchen aromas are steeping that around noon will be served at the table… A Botticelli-like girl passes by fleetingly. From the street come the honks and voices of street vendors.

In Paris he will exhibit pieces that recall the successful exhibition Conversaciones en el huerto, which had as objects of representation tools, utensils and implements "worked" by time, in apparent abandonment.

Montoto is mostly known for fruits, vegetable elements with almost always bright illumination amid desolate urban landscapes. But his work is versatile, moving through diverse thematic directions and, even, approaching abstraction millimetrically when presenting macro details of those same elements.

In 2018 he held the exhibition Dark in Havana, of painting and sculpture, after six years without showing his work in Cuba. On that occasion there was speculation about the "dark" character of the works.

This "dark" character was due to the fact that the works were predominantly black and black is automatically associated with darkness. In reality, art is made partly with the concrete lived experiences of the artist and partly with intellectual experience plus the heritage and mark that art history has left on his training. In the previous years he had had a very intense practice with diaphanous and refulgent color, and this causes a certain exhaustion or perceptual dulling, which demands a diminishment or dimming of color; but it was not only that: at the same time the artist wanted to introduce into the work, especially in painting, elements proper to the most trivial everyday life to polemicize with traditional imaginaries of what supposedly identifies the Cuban.

Thus he was attempting for Cubanness to remain veiled behind the darkness of black as neutrality, and for everything to be perceived as inconsequential.