Michel Pérez Pollo

Michel Pérez Pollo’s abstract-figurative works give him a unique position in his generation, and among artists in Cuba as a whole. The paintings may seem childlike and naive, but his concern is to avoid faithful accuracy in favor of a universal expression. His models are figures and shapes made of modelling clay, which he greatly enlarges and exaggerates when painting them.

His particular style of painting is bold, often lavish in his application of the fluid paint, and therefore reminiscent of revolutionary murals, depictions imbued with messages. He focuses on the superordinate, the human-personal, so that his paintings seem like expressions of a new humanism, especially wherever there is talk of a “tropical depression” – an actual meteorological term for a weather situation in the Caribbean that is dismal, grave, densely cloudy and dark. Pérez Pollo reinterprets it expressionistically, in strong paintings. Where once debilitating melancholia loomed, he reports with a positive attitude, with personal gravity and self-assertion.