Galerie Gabriel

TRANSITIONS…From Cuba to America

by JULIO FERRER

Since 1990, Julio Ferrer has won 21 awards for his artwork, including two top prizes for his cartoons and political satire in the Bienal Internacional del Humor de San Antonio de los Baños, in Havana Cuba  (1997, 2001). In 2006, he was awarded Artist of the Year in his home province of Cienfuegos.  Ferrer currently resides and works in Canada.

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Julio Ferrer is the purest of artists indebted to the Cuban pop art movement. When he does reveal himself as heir to a tradition embodied by Raúl Martínez and Frémez, Ferrer’s differences are apparent in the national recontextualization of the codes of this North American school. First, they are visible in the formal composition, of the purity of color and the prominence of the line, as well as the compositional frontality and form-background distancing. Second, he does not rely on self-defining moments in history or a national spirit to define the native condition. Rather, he seeks out the phenomenal, laid over the surface of a socio-political context or the day-to-day economic conditions in Cuba, offering an almost traditional narrative quality, bound by distant reference points that are drawn into the reality that he describes, and a love for the vignette or chronological storytelling in comic style.   Third, and perhaps most distinctly, his sarcasm sets him apart with a humor that is far more toxic than a friendly joke or vulgar mockery. Rafael Grillo, Art Critic