Poetry, fantasy and technique take the lead in the artwork of Ignacio Nazabal (Havana, 1962). In his painting, the Cuban artist offers a stroll through the teeming corners of his imagination, crammed with colour and suggestive shapes. A universe he brings to life by bringing the human being, personified in the body of a woman, into harmony with nature.
His creations come out of a surrealist style that mixes a bit of the art of Dalí with that of Arcimboldo. From the Spaniard he takes the irrational effect caused by the unusual order the elements occupy within his compositions. Holding on more to the game with the laws of visual perception than to his taste for deforming matter.
So he often resorts to integrating or disintegrating the figures, inviting the viewer to take part in building their meaning. He uses fruit, animals, objects or nature itself to put together the voluptuous bodies of the women he depicts, which bring Arcimboldo so strongly to mind.
In this way he creates an attractive, illusionist and meticulous painting that combines allegory and paradox. Because he develops his artwork with a purpose of understanding that pushes whoever contemplates it to look for a meaning in the apparently unrelated arrangement of its components and in the replacement of one element by another, as symbols that reveal what remains invisible. Perhaps the fusion between the human and the natural, between the eternal and the fleeting.
Ignacio Nazabal graduated in Biological Sciences in 1985 from the University of Havana and, in 2000, completed his training at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. His work has been part of numerous group and solo exhibitions both in Cuba and internationally. In 2011 he won First Prize in the Online Portrait Competition of the Society for Art of Imagination.
Find out more about Ignacio Nazabal and his artwork here!
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