Juan Suarez Blanco is 67 years old this October 19, an artist who has put his soul into abstract, conceptual art and a little beyond, because his works are always an enigma above an artistic canon or pattern.
As we are used to call him in Maxima, simply Juan, he is passionate about music, specifically classical music. Perhaps that is why it is so easy to trace a melodic path in his creations, a path of rhythmic undulations full of colors, highs and lows, circles, erosions and landscapes as elements of memory and our passage through the world. In other words, his pictorial work represents a forceful trace of who we have been and what we could be as a species.
For some time now, Suarez Blanco has aspired to achieve "the great work", or as he himself likes to say, his ninth symphony. To a certain extent, we have already seen from his hands an exquisite, refined art, with deep and challenging messages. His crowning piece has been -to call it somehow- a constant, rising and heterogeneous career.
Without knowing it, the artist has fulfilled that purpose, but perhaps the feeling of nonconformity and renewal moves his desire to do more and better, a purpose that has led him to produce again and again without rest, sniffing and looking for something more, and in that search we have been surprised with the wonders of his creative formats.
From now on, Juan Suarez Blanco has the floor.
-If we were to make a retrospective of your work, how much has it evolved over time?
I've said this a few times, my first exhibition was when I was 11 years old, I was at the Artemisa plastic arts school-workshop, where I enrolled without my family, who found out almost a week later because I was late. That was in January 1964, and by December of that same year I had a personal exhibition.
Later, when I was 12 years old, I took the tests for the art school in Pinar del Rio and I passed them. I was a junior high school student. There we studied elementary and middle school. From that stage I liked figuration, I did portraits, landscapes and still lifes. There was a teacher who instilled in me the bug to renew myself, to connect with the world, to do something different, and that teacher was Carlos Hernandez.
I connected with the European avant-garde movement, pop art, and I saw everything that was being done in the world. I also discovered the material painting of the great Spanish masters and others in Latin America such as Antonio Berni.
I identified with the art that is made with poor things, jute sacks, tar paper, sand. Once I graduated from school, my work went in that direction. I did a social service, something brutal, it was for two years and I had to stay for five, where I was practically inactive, teaching classes in Sandino. Artistic education was beginning to be applied in pedagogical schools and we had to cover almost all those spaces at the 1971 graduation and I was out of the artistic context. What I did was to draw, my notes, sketches, I wrote poetry and stories.
In 1979 I participated in the 26th of July National Salon and I connected again with the competitive art world in Cuba, then I was invited to the first Aristides Hernandez drawing triennial, where I shared space with Fabelo, Choco and others of that generation. There I was among the ten finalists and I definitely started up again.
I worked on a personal exhibition in 1984 of engravings and drawings, and then in 1989 I did another exhibition of installations, ready-made, with something performative in Pinar del Rio, which was also exhibited at the Caimán Barbudo hall, where I met Gretel Mosquera and Desiderio Navarro, who gave a lecture on current art and my exhibition was setting the stage. My work was rather neo-conceptualist, it touched on core aspects of society, but with a more universalist approach, not so local.
In conclusion, there was a crisis of materials, I began to recycle objects and everything that my art has today, is already from that stage, where I place spatulas, knives, rollers and I incorporate them and put them as protagonists in the relief pieces.
The first thing I did was sculpture, I was 10 or 11 years old, I have kept the sculptural element in all my work. I'll tell you now a phrase of Beethoven, with whom I identify myself with his music and thought: "I have been preparing to make a ninth symphony", and I have also been preparing for that, although I have not yet done it. The continuity of my work is the concern for man, for seeking joy in him, as well as human improvement, perhaps I have not yet reached the ninth symphony, I have done a few, but not yet the ninth, hopefully God will give me the opportunity.
-The confinement stage, how productive has it been?
I was making some sketches about the entrance of the pandemic to the world, from one of them came the first work "It rains on the fault", very abstract and minimalist, which simulates a rain of the pandemic, where a red belt falls from the sky, with an abstract language and on a fault zone that suggests the ecological imbalances that exist on the planet. Everything falls and spreads.
The other pieces have to do with desolate ports, silences, relative tranquility and the enclosed world. Then came "The pink cloud" and there is also "The blue cloud", where there is a lot of desolation, but with very tender colors, with a lot of light and a hopeful message from the silence. Almost all the works have some relief, very slight.
I also had pending a work from the Erosion series, called "Erosion 7", where you can see the entrance of a red angle from above on an eroded metal piece (it is mutating), which is like on a tightrope. The viewer can see a cutting metallic area. I owed the work to the Erosion series, because I had not finished it.
Still in progress is "The Tempest" and "Scorpion No 7," a tribute to Mondrian. It is a soothing piece, the end of a spatula I turn it into a scorpion, all in a range of yellows, which is displacing a red area. It has a Mondrianic structure, that is to say, geometrizing with a predominance of the horizontal with some verticality.
I wanted to end the interview with this proverb: "the night before dawn is never so black". On the back of the storm hides a rainbow (...) I have tried to make music with my work.
Published 19/10/2020