René Portocarrero

One of the leading figures in Cuban plastic arts. His pictorial universe encompasses the creation of paintings, illustration of books and magazines, graphic designs, and murals.

He was born in the Cerro municipality in the capital. From a very young age he showed his vocation for painting. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen he attended brief courses at the Villate and San Alejandro academies. His artistic temperament did not adapt to this type of learning and he continued painting on his own.

In 1934 he held his first solo exhibition. From then on and for several decades, his work would reflect the light, color, and rhythm of his country.

He was essentially a self-taught painter. He worked as an instructor at the Estudio Libre para Pintores y Escultores de la Habana (1937), and his drawings were published in the magazines Verbum, Espuela de Plata, and Orígenes.

He taught drawing around 1943 at the Cárcel de La Habana, where he left a religious mural. Works such as Interiores del Cerro, Festines, and Figuras para una Mitología Contemporánea had great influence in defining his style.

In the second half of the 1940s decade he addressed the theme of popular festivities in an extensive series of pastels, and began decorating ceramic pieces. He conceived in this technique the mural Historia de las Antillas for the Hotel Habana Hilton and another in 1968 with the theme of ornamented women and Flora, which resulted in a series of paintings exhibited at the Thirty-third Venice Biennale.

His habit of working in extensive cycles with central subjects that served as motifs to develop led, in 1962, to the Color de Cuba exhibition composed of religious images linked to Cuban Santería, ornamented women and carnival figures; the latter became the subject of a special series of works on paper which he titled: Carnavales (1970-1971); followed by other cycles: Figuras sedentes (1975-1976), Transfiguración y fuga, and Madres eternas (1982).

The specialist Adelaida de Juan, in her work Pintura Cubana: Temas y Variaciones, refers to René Portocarrero's work:
"Starting from the 1940s, new visions of the city emerge. In addition to the night city of Víctor Manuel, Portocarrero begins his numerous approaches. First are the Interiores del Cerro, in which the ornament of the architecture and furnishings coil and encompass the entire composition, including the human figure. Later, in the nineteen-fifties, it is the entire city and not just a neighborhood; but it is a city that has become thin and refined until it becomes almost an architectural plane. Its color is dedicated and sad and its schematicism, mere suggestion of a depersonalized city.

In the nineteen-sixties the initial exuberance of line and color resurges, but no longer confined to Cerro but in a total display of color, great synthesis of buildings, streets, statues and, above all, the very atmosphere of a city rediscovered by the painter.

In that same period, Portocarrero presents extended series of flowers, of thick impasto and rich color, which will pass, as an integrated element in more complex compositions such as the Ornamented Heads, the Floras and the mosaic mural of the palace of revolution, where flowers, heads and snails merge in a panoramic and poetic vision of our island.

He received numerous distinctions and decorations, among which the following stand out:
Order of Culture of Poland, the highest decoration awarded by this country to the most outstanding foreign intellectuals.
Order of Cyril and Methodius Second Class of Bulgaria in 1976.
In 1979 he was named Honorary Advisor Member of the International Association of Plastic Artists of UNESCO.
On October 4, 1981 he was decorated with the Orden Félix Varela of First Class awarded by the State Council of the Republic of Cuba.
On September 14, 1982 he was awarded the Águila Azteca, the highest Mexican decoration.
Published Books

He has published two books:
El sueño (1939), with his own drawings and texts.
Las Máscaras (1955), a collection of twelve drawings.