With the title Ernesto Briel, Iridescent Geometries, the Juan Carlos Maldonado Art Collection gives continuity to the exhibition project that began six years ago. Since then, its objective has been to promote the study of modern and contemporary art at an international level, emphasizing abstract-geometric practices. On this occasion, and after having exhibited part of his collection, he focuses his attention on the work of Ernesto Briel, a Cuban optical artist whose production is practically unknown, even among specialists in Latin American art.
With this, JCMAC hopes to make a supplementary contribution to the study of abstract arts in Cuba, where political circumstances made the development of an art that was thought of as an autonomous practice almost impossible, not because it was disinterested in the political challenges of the 20th century. Quite the contrary, but because its authors were convinced that, by expanding the aesthetic boundaries of a community, whatever it might be, at the same time, the possibilities of reaching a social equilibrium were widening beyond the political demands of a given historical moment. Enriching humanity’s expressive tools implies a political position, not necessarily limited to a specific ideology.
Ernesto Briel is an artist whose work begins in the sixties of the last century; that is to say, when concrete, optical and kinetic abstraction had already borne its best results in the countries of the region, from Argentina to Mexico. With this, the public is faced with an abstract-geometric practice and typically optical when the expansion of these aesthetics reached maximum popularity and with it, even a hybridization process that makes this works a curious Pop expression of abstraction. Hence this unexpected hybridization of optical strategies in the manner of Vasarely with Pop motifs, such as traffic signs, letters, stars, and signs of wide circulation in the cities of the present.
Curator
Ariel Jiménez
Photo: Untitled, 1967 (detail), Ernesto Briel.
