For a few seconds Rachel silently gazes at a blank canvas placed a few inches from her. She chooses a tube of deep green paint. She does not need to mix it with any other color. She squeezes the container and places the pigment on the palette, then takes the brush and prepares to give life to the woman wrapped in roses, shells and insects, who flies over the artist's head. The painting is ready after three weeks. Without looking for it, the Cuban painter has a self-portrait in front of her. Her name: "Ideas that adorn."
In Rachel Pérez Troncoso's life, not much more than a week has passed in which she stops painting. "Art lives in me. I have always been very attached not only to visual arts, but to a taste for dance, music, for enjoying and doing theater. I love the most cultured expression of art ”, confesses the young creator.
It is part of her human nature to experience the environment from an artistic sense and observe the details of a space to photograph or build a plastic work. As she herself recounts, she is not pigeonholed into a style, but rather explores a symbiotic and expressive way of working.
Graduated in 2009 from the Eduardo Abela Provincial Academy of Plastic Arts, in San Antonio de los Baños, the Mayan artist has initial training in engraving, especially in the technique of inverted monotypes and serigraphy. The series "Who does not love is already dead" corresponds to this first stage, an intimate theme that she finished developing at the age of 20.
After leaving the academy, Rachel joined Puente Sur, a group that included eleven artists from Melena del Sur, whom she recognizes as mentors. The time she spent with them allowed her to diversify the supports and work materials, in addition to giving her work a more conceptual character. It was then that she began creating installations and performances in public spaces.
Pérez Troncoso affirms that of all the aesthetic-discursive currents she prefers "expressionism in its purest, most dynamic state, most in movement". That is why she admires Monet and Van Gogh and other Cuban exponents of universal stature such as Cervando Cabrera and Amelia Peláez, "with their strong, well-delineated contours."
For Rachel, being a woman in a male-dominated environment is complex. That is why from a very young age she learned to defend her ideas, to be critical of herself, to take suggestions in a positive way, and to reject condescension. “Personally, it was difficult for me and another colleague who is part of a group made up of only men —except for us— to get the quality of our work recognized, and that also happens when you are still young. But in the end, perseverance, study and your work speak for you ”, she highlights.
Currently, the artist is developing her second production called "Resistance Series". It is a discursive line in which feelings prevail and the human being is assumed as a sensory being, linked to nature and supported by the figuration of insects, especially those that live in a colony. “It could be said that the works go from the intimacy of individual affective deficiencies to a fabric of social relationships. Looking inside and knowing how we work is my greatest interest ”.
By: Mabel Torres, December 2021