Nelson Domínguez
Alinka Arte Contemporáneo. Santo Domingo
The fruit of a remarkable curatorial task by María Consuelo Padilla and Lázaro Raúl Estrada, “De Cuba Nelson Domínguez: Pintura, escultura, dibujo y grabados” (“From Cuba Nelson Domínguez: Painting, sculpture, drawing and engraving”), the first solo show of this great Cuban artist in the Dominican Republic, ran from mid-June to the end of September at the welcoming spaces of Alinka Arte Contemporáneo, and constituted the most important exhibition presented by the gallery so far this year.
More than thirty works have allowed us to come into direct contact with the high levels of formal depuration, as well as with the profound cultural, aesthetic and ideological founda- tions that animate Nelson Domínguez’s specialized and distinctive creative practice. This rigorous expositional selection functions and resists on the basis of a series of recent pictorial works that have a remarkable expressive impact, among them, Juego Familiar (2006), Ambivalencia (2010), La Familia (2010), La Espantapájaros (2009), El Ojo Rabioso, Colibrí, abanico y máscara, Catarsis del Juego (2010) and Yemayá (2010).
In these paintings, Nelson Domínguez reveals himself to be an incisive chronicler of polysynthesis; a creator of fantastic narratives based on enigma and delirium; a fugitive from his ancestral doubts and his daily certainties; expert thaumaturge of the “journey to the seed”, referring us constantly to the enigmatic sensuality of nature, to the sense of the land, introspective “landscape” of these radiant spiritual latitudes. Likewise, these works are also based on a lucid aesthetic rigorousness that implies a full knowledge of classic techniques and of the structural keys of the “pictorial system”, without overlooking the specular ciphers that reflect his pristine existential rapport with the fundamentals of the creative act. Born in Baire, Santiago de Cuba, on 23 September, 1947 and trained at the Cubanacán National School of Art (1965-1970), where he served as a professor (1970-1985), Nelson Domínguez has never lost his deep concentration when working in his studio, nor has he clung to a single artistic trend or line of creation, experimenting constantly with different mediums and materials: fabrics, paper, metal, crystal, clay and wood. In 2009, Nelson Domínguez was the recipient of the National Visual Arts Award, the highest distinction granted on different occasions to great Cuban artists of the stature of Alfredo Sosabravo, Adigio Benítez, Pedro Pablo Oliva, René de la Nuez and José Villa.
