(…)In the context of Cuban art today, it is possible to recognize a given trend to a type of painting playing more on the ambivalence between the figurative and the abstract, especially in the landscape genre. But it is increasingly rare to find young painters with purely abstract proposals. This is the case of Ernesto García Sánchez. He confesses that everything that has interested him up to now is researching the pictorial phenomenon. And, of course, his research materializes in an exploration of the expressive possibilities the medium offers, without having to resort to an explicit semantics. He is not interested in that direct contact with the world through communicative structures (iconic statements) remitting the recipient to cultural and perceptual references identifiable, recognizable to a certain point. Ernesto García has chosen for the type of diffuse communication abstraction itself is. (…)
In his most recent production we find series such as Pinturas cuadriculadas(Squared Paintings), Color Labels or Las pinturas que nacen muertas (The Paintings that Born Dead). In the first one, Ernesto uses veiled surfaces divided into squares on which he embodies volumetric masses of intense colors: red, black, green, yellow. Configurations create strange plastic geographies, seeming to be continental surfaces, or strange prehistoric organisms; although what we write is nothing more than the perceptive delirium they cause in us. The titles of most of the pieces in the series are money figures (One thousand dollars, Eight hundred ninety dollars, Nine hundred dollars, One thousand dollars 2). (…)
The contrast between the perfect geometry of squared surfaces, and the irregular plastic forms, expressionist up to a certain point, would be something like a subtle metaphor of the incongruence existing between the world of the instrumental order of finances and the structural ambiguity suitable for art.(…)
In “the paintings born dead,” (…) the canvases start to be soaked in various areas of the composition. The result is extraordinary. Squared surfaces reappear, but now well made by empty spaces. Void turns into a visual component in these works and the areas on which the paintings are hung emerge as backgrounds integrated to the pictorial structure. In this sense, the works lack a definitive aspect, they are chameleonic, they have the capacity to suction inside themselves all type of visual information the surfaces of the walls have. There is a case in which (…) the fretwork has chaotically eaten a good part of the canvas: chaotic in its devouring display, but impeccably regular in its squared design. At first sight, it seems to be the effect of a moth, a painting that has been bitten to death. It is possible to see the stretcher, the hidden frame that now becomes part of the general visualization. The regularity pattern of the optic effect is assaulted by the void which, for its part, drafts other possible paths for the look. The dissolution of pictorial forms gives way to the embodiment of a sort of object-painting. Paradoxes of perception, or the freedom and complexity of enjoying abstraction.
