"...A rare explorer of reality..."*
Reasons for a prize.
After
a silence without adjectives regarding to his busy life and continuous
work, the announcement is almost amazing: Antonio Vidal has gained
the 1999 National Plastic Arts Prize.
Undoubtfully, Antonio Vidal`s pictorial work, executed along fifty
years, has traversed a long way and grown up through the searching
of own expressive possibilities, not fashionable but attending the
artist´s interest, inserting his feelings in his works.
This Havana-born
artist, started in the academy, because he wanted to be a good academicist,
as result of this exercise remained his love for work, exigency,
discipline, because he was interesed very early in a proper language
to overturn his passions. Abstract Art has in Antonio Vidal a permanent
representer within Cuban Painting since that historical exhibition
in which Antonio participated together with Guido Llinás,
Antonia Eiriz, Fayad Jamís and Manolo Vidal at CTC Culture
Secretary, in 1952. As a journalist stated then: ''Different five
artists with a common aspiration of emphaze their liberty, free
of the rules stymieing the current painting''.
1953 has an special significance for him and Cuban Art, a group
of 15 young artists, associated due to their aesthethic likeness
and frank rebelliousness against established rules prepared a group
exhibition at Society of Our Times Gallery, in this exhibition only
participated eleven of those artists, since then, they adquired
the name of The Eleven**, with this name they organized another
exhibition in April at La Rampa Gallery.
As Joaquín Texeidor stated in this exhibition`s opening words ''It`s
the eternal and ardent struggle, this group has taken to find a
new sense to the world, spirit, life and above all, to express themselves
with the freedom only allowed to art, happily far from all future
representation, placing them in the right time and future''.
....From that
moment up to 1999, more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions,
in Cuba and abroad, have seen his artworks far from figuration,
concentrated on colors, featured with a language allowing his most
fulfilled expression, taking him to movement or quietness, faithful
to abstraction, a permanent renovation, implicit in his paintings,
engraves and sculptures because his eternal creativeness is present
in different expressive, monochromatic and colorful possibilities.
"Collages",
textures, dropping......, multiplicity without repetition.
 Besides
his own work, he teached during eighteen years at National School
of Art, offering leadership and support for more than one generation.
National
Plastic Arts Prize`s last award in this century has certainly relapsed
on an artist who, after developing a wide and purified work, received
the new century encouraging the canvas and white sheets of paper`s
challenge and assuming the responsability of keeping his mark in
the best scene of Cuban Art.
*Named by Fayad Jamís, painter and poet – poet and
painter, man of high sensibility who accompained Antonio in his
first group exposition.
**Members of The Eleven Group: Francisco Antigua, José Antonio Díaz
Peláez, José Ignacio Bermúdez, Hugo Consuegra, Fayad Jamís, Veredo,
Tomás Oliva, René Ávila, Guido Llinás and Antonio Vidal.
See more information at National
Council of Plastic Arts
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