Being invited to a party can be attractive, compromising or disturbing, it depends on who and where, but when that invitation is to an exhibition in a renovated city space, this PARTY promises to be a good encounter with painting, of creation.
Color appropriates the fabrics and they in turn populate the gallery. Thus, these works by Estaban Leyva Espinosa (Havana-1957), all members of his most recent production, show the expertise of this experienced art maker, who successfully masters the secrets of painting. All these spatial explorations are pertinent and wait for our proximity to reach their full realization.
Leyva achieves an atmosphere of plenitude in this exhibition in which the pupils delight in an intense color handled with skill and precision. The audacity of a creator who has gone through different moments in creation, all successfully raffled off, reaches this collection in which an exuberant and voluptuous chromatic explosion is accompanied by titles with a marked poetic breath and to reach the feminine presence in Dressed for the party and My girlfriend Havana; or a presentation of the seabed at Fiesta en el mar I and II. But, sobriety also appropriates the plots, as in the Flowers and Fish diptych, in which the grays rule, or the blues of the seraphic Feast of the Lost Angels.
A whole world with elements by Miró and Kandinski, which this pure-bred habanero presents in filigree lines with intense spots of colors, and the constant use of dripping.
Rich and diverse imagination that overflows in these large-format canvases, of an artist endowed with an inner gaze that he shares with the viewer. It is possible to see in Esteban's work the outbreak of the pictorial gesture, an inviting gesture, the spark of light that becomes a permanent questioning, constant search. These elements of color and light, born of a constant shock, not imposed but eminently organic. Thus in his work an identification is reached that clearly speaks of an identity rooted in his contact with the city, with his landscape, but also with our idiosyncrasy. Let us therefore enjoy this Festival, a chimerical pictorial mirage.
Virginia Alberdi
May / 2008
