Do you like the song of birds?” Adrián Socorro asks when someone visits his studio and questions him about the meaning of one of his paintings. People usually answer: “yes”. The artist already has his final blow up his sleeve: “And do you understand it? [refusal or silence]. That is the essence of my art…”
When he paints, Adrián uses various techniques and styles, from acrylics, watercolors, oils, to using any material that provides the color. At the moment of creation, he lets himself be carried away by the freedom that invades him, by the poetry that comes out of his hands and that takes on nuance, shape, texture, in each of his canvases. "I do not agree that every work of art should say something concrete, because that denies the intuitive character of the artist," he says.
"Many times I paint things that have no initial meaning," he continues. I don't want to say anything at all, I just think of images, I put them on the canvas and I create things that don't exist. I feel free from ties, free from having to send a message with my work”.
Owner of an intimate visual style and language, at 42 years of age and after having exhibited solo on more than twenty occasions, the creator claims to have reached artistic maturity and does not recognize himself in anyone's work, even when he points out as main referring to the Cuban and European avant-gardes of the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, especially impressionism and expressionism.
“I feel that I have already achieved my own language and an artistic personality and a more individual way of saying things have come to light. It should be the goal of every artist to get there, more than a conceptual discourse, to get your own voice, so that people in the crowd can see a line and say: 'That piece is by Adrián Socorro,'" adds the painter.
The artist shows total irreverence in the face of commercial formulas that tarnish the originality of a work. That is why, when asked about the Cuban and Caribbean essence in his work, Socorro confesses that she is not particularly interested in “palmitas, bohíos, mulattos”… and that Cubanness often stereotyped in plastic arts, in the cinema or in the TV.
For him, circumscribing himself to a "Cuban" visuality sometimes denotes the search for a fixed market, which does not contribute anything to the development of the artist. "My art has a universal starting point," he warns. And it is that, in the opinion of the author of collections such as Mapa somático or Caída libre, living daily on this Island is reason enough to affirm that he makes Cuban art for the world.
The man from Matanzas describes his relationship with art as daily, whose presence is manifested in the paintings and painting materials that he has in his home or in his relationship with his wife, who is an actress. "My immediate concept of art is my day-to-day, family portraits, intimate scenes, my thoughts, that's why I make many self-portraits and a work that speaks to you closely."
Adrián paints daily, and the more he does it, the more he wants to paint. This is precisely what he identifies as a kind of “very favorable hurricane for work”. “I am constantly evolving. I always surprise myself and that is something I would never want to lose. I never know what I am going to paint the next day.”
By: Mabel Torres