Carmelo González Gutiérrez: symbols and chimeras

In the artwork of Carmelo González Gutiérrez (Cuba, 1956), art stops being only aesthetics and becomes a message too. To pull it off, he develops a kind of painting with a strong symbolic charge, fed by his imagination and his longings.

Settled in Tenerife since 2002, he is the son of two greats of Cuban art: Carmelo González Iglesias and Ana Rosa Gutiérrez Martínez. So art has been part of his life from the cradle. And that influence he took in at home, above all his father's, is a pleasure to spot in his compositions.

At first glance, the Surrealist movement and Salvador Dalí are present in them. Although the truth is that the Cuban painter puts together a personal language, which he calls structural symbolism. He takes for himself the artist's freedom to create as he pleases and decides to express himself through a network of symbols that relate to one another, offering the viewer a message. The viewer will have to draw his own conclusions, since the ideas he paints on his canvases don't hide a single meaning.

These vivid visual metaphors, full of colour and rich in detail, give shape to a wide variety of themes that speak of the past and of the present. Of thoughts, experiences, dreams, fantasies and memories. In short, of whatever his imagination proposes, whether it can happen or not. And, especially, he pays tribute to Cuba, to its culture and its history. His series Objetos flotantes stands out, a group of paintings in which he recreates, in a sarcastic tone, the tragedy of Cuban emigration. Reminding us, that way, of the protest role that art keeps in its essence.

Since he was a teenager, Carmelo González Gutiérrez has experimented with those disciplines of the visual arts that caught his interest, and so he is, besides a painter, an engraver, a graphic and advertising designer, a comics artist and a photographer. His artistic CV is a long one. He has taken part in more than fifty exhibitions, both in his home country and abroad, and has received numerous prizes that recognise the quality of his work.

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