On Thursday, June 3rd, 2021, PIASA will present more than 101 works of art in its Modern and Contemporary Art auction, including those of Cuban artists Agustín Cárdenas and Joaquín Ferrer.
In this dedicated focus, PIASA revisits the unbreakable friendship between Cuban artists Agustín Cárdenas (1927-2001) and Joaquín Ferrer (born in 1929), which has lasted since they met as students at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana in the early 1950s. At that time, the young men also made the decisive acquaintance of their elder and mentor, the great Cuban surrealist painter, Wifredo Lam. Although Cárdenas and Ferrer had already gained recognition by regularly exhibiting their work in Havana, their ambition and thirst for discovery soon led them to Paris. Agustín Cárdenas went there in 1955 with Wifredo Lam and, four years later, Joaquín Ferrer joined them (the young artists were both on scholarship from the Cuban government).
Upon his arrival in Paris, Agustín Cárdenas became close to André Breton and the Surrealists, with whom he exhibited, notably at the Daniel Cordier Gallery (Paris, 1959), at D'Arcy's Galleries (New York, 1961) and at the L'Œil Gallery (Paris, 1965). At their side, but also in contact with the work of Brancusi and Arp, Cárdenas forged his style: he allowed himself to reconnect with his African roots, reinvigorating the spiritual, sensual and lyrical character of his work.
In the catalog of his first solo exhibition, which took place in 1959 at the La Cour d'Ingres gallery, André Breton praised the sculptor's talent, comparing the agility of his hand to that of a dragonfly: "However skilful it may be - like a dragonfly - the hand of Cárdenas, for our happiness, remains at this highly privileged stage. Here sprang from his fingers the great totem in flowers which better than a saxophone cambered the size of the beautiful. "
Agustín Cárdenas (1927-2001)
Untitled
Estimate : 100 000 - 150 000 €
Ferrer, when he moved to Paris, evolved in a more isolated way, which did not prevent him from being represented at the Galerie du Dragon in 1961 in a Cuban exhibition organized by Robert Altmann, then from participating in 1962 in "Cuba and Cubans" at the Maison des Jeunes de Clichy as well as in the group exhibition "Latin American Art" at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Max Ernst, impressed by Ferrer's painting (he prefaced the catalog of his first exhibition at the La Roue gallery in 1968), whom he had met through the intermediary of the poet and exegete of the artist, Alain Bosquet, wrote about him: "(...) As for the young people, I pity them. How they do not have the impression that all was made before them? It is wrong to make them gods before they have even had time to express themselves. One of them, Ferrer, is a bit my discovery. Far from Pop Art, Mec-Art, and their substitutes, he seems to me deeply authentic (...)."
Max Ernst refers here to the achievements of Ferrer dating from the mid-1960s, of a new geometry, where the planes are superimposed in the thin space of the table, without thickness or depth, in pastel tones.
Of great singularity, these paintings distanced themselves from those of the beginning of the decade, where Ferrer was more influenced by the surrealist universe of Wifredo Lam. In Paris, the art of Agustín Cárdenas and Joaquín Ferrer was very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, with the public being particularly attracted by everything that came from Cuba. The artists frequented the same circles of friends, the poets René Char, Edouard Glissant, Alejo Carpentier, the painters Roberto Matta and Jorge Camacho, to name but a few. Both represented by the gallery Le Point Cardinal, this one celebrates their friendship by exposing them together on its stand of the Fiac of 1978.
The dialogue thus established between Cárdenas' sculptures and Ferrer's paintings underlines the permanence of affinities, even the existence of a certain tropism in their plastic language. Is this due to the ancestral heritage of Wifredo Lam? To the eternal memory of the Cuban jungle? To their interest in the primitive arts? To the importance they both give to the practice of drawing? By reuniting the works of Cárdenas and Ferrer, Piasa brings these questions up to date, paying a fitting tribute to these companions in exile.
Joaquin Ferrer (born 1929)
Au loin la memoire, 1978
Estimate: 10 000 - 15 000 €
