Ania Toledo: dreaming the landscape

Road to Isazu, by Ania Toledo
Road to Isazu, by Ania Toledo.
Women painters who are successful in landscape painting are few in Cuba, it is no secret to anyone. When one thinks of Cuban landscape artists, one name par excellence emerges, Tomás Sánchez, a true master. His refined, exquisite and renovating work causes too many sensations not to resort to it, if it is a reference.
 
But as every rule has its exception, Ania Toledo has earned a name, a reputation as a high-carat landscape artist in the Greater Antilles. Spiritual by birth, since the 90's, when she started her artistic career, nature in its purest, truest and most effective state has been the immediate stage, the main beat of her work, the primeval condition of her tonalities.
 
Toledo's creations have one element in common beyond the country scenes: the mixture of ochre colors together with green. A natural and intimate atmosphere thus emerges, the eyes perceive the piece as real, as if you were really in front of the described scenario and not a painting with certain dimensions. The impression is extraordinary, the artist allows the senses to be filled with a beauty that reconnects man with his natural state. Ania Toledo is a woman who allows us to dream again and again the landscape as new.
 
Her work is unlike that of any other painter. That intentional, easy and hackneyed brushstroke is not found in her pieces, rather it outlines the intention towards a lush vegetation. Each branch, trunk or tree appears to be worked with great detail and perfection, as if he were moving his roots and waiting for them to germinate in the work. The part that leads to the whole is the maximum essence of his creative work.
 
The human hand that destroys and erodes the forests does not appear in his pictorial insinuations. Artistic environments emerge in their most virgin and unpolluted state, where we can immerse ourselves to find peace in an increasingly complex and challenging world. The sensation of humidity, the presence of shade as a natural element are other resources to move us towards that ideal paradise, which calms us immediately.
 
Behind all these intentions, Toledo tries to make us escape from the everyday, from common life, from the ramifications that wear us out and to feel, yes, to feel and breathe that air needed in its works, to bathe in its rivers, to smile on the sidewalks, to connect with the past, in the end, we came to this world to be happy. The author of Camino al Isazu remembers this over and over again using the landscape as a stimulus for visual memory.
 

SEE WORKS BY ANIA TOLEDO

Posted 10/03/2020