Juan T. Vázquez Martín
Juan T. Vázquez Martín (December 23, 1940 in Caibarién, Las Villas, Cuba - January 31, 2017 in Miami, Florida) lived and worked in Havana, died in Miami. This artist is listed among the Cuban Painters masters. An exceptional prolific abstract painter with a refine style of paint, creativity and cultivated technique. Painter, founder and director of art schools and galleries, teacher of drawing and painting, he was an artist who travelled the world for solo exhibitions, or as a curator for Cuban painters art shows. His paintings are held in international and private collections in South and  Central America and Caribbean islands, North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Middle East. Biography. Vázquez Martín used to say his artwork was influenced by Paul Cézanne, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Antoni Tàpies y Manolo Millares, and the Cuban painters Juan Tapia Ruano y Hugo Consuegra. He was member of the Writer and Artists Union of Cuba (UNEAC) and the International Association of Art (AIAP). Vázquez Martín was several times selected by the artists members, as President and Vice-President of the Painting Association at the Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), in recognition to ‘his courage defending the  contemporary painting in Cuba’, an office he held each time from 1989 to 1998 This painter art of painting is studied and continue being listed among the worldwide abstract painters masters. His work is held in a number of prestigious collections of national and international institutions including UNESCO International Association of Art (AIAP) in Paris, the Spanish Office of the European Economic Community in New York and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; also artworks of Vázquez Martín are listed in the National Catalogue Foundation of Great Britain because of this artist art presence in that country . As a teacher this Cuban painter had a good pedagogy technique. He used to teach with an infinite source of creative classes to introduce and stimulate the students interest to the art of painting, its history and appreciation. Vázquez Martín believed that artists should know well the world where they live and how art has contributed to its development as well as its present influence and importance for the future. Critics. Dr Josephine Reynell from Oxford Hertford College says. 'The name of Juan T. Vázquez Martín is among of the great Cuban masters of painting; he is also considered one  of Cuba’s leading abstract painters. Through dedication to artistic freedom he played a seminal role in keeping abstract art alive in Cuba. The so-called Grey Period or El Quinquenio Gris in Cuban culture, between 1970–1976, seriously undermined abstract art and indeed experimentation in all areas of the arts in Cuba. Art was seen as a useful propaganda tool and whilst no artist was forbidden to work in a certain way, only those artists whose work conformed to what was considered acceptable were supported. Many artists left the country. Juan T. Vázquez Martín’s refusal to leave Cuba and  his steadfast commitment to his personal artistic vision exacted a heavy economic and personal cost, losing him official patronage and promotion. His courageous maintenance of his artistic vision in the face of real hardship had nevertheless enabled him to develop an unique style of painting which has had a profound influence on the new generation of young Cuban artists. He was Director of a number of Schools of Visual Arts in Cuba and taught various well known Cuban artists including Flora Fong (exhibited in London 2007), Gabriel Gutierrez, Nasario Salazar, Oscar Rodriguez Laseria and Joel Jover. At the age of  16, he won a prestigious and highly competitive scholarship to the Academia Leopoldo Romañach in Santa Clara, renowned as the most progressive art school in Cuba at that time. His art has been influenced by his close friendship with the renowned Cuban painters Hugo Consuega and Tapia Ruano, but over the years he developed his own and unique style of painting.' The Cuban painter and critic Manuel López Oliva writes. 'Looking at Juan Vázquez Martín's paintings, what is immediately recognisable, is the Renaissance concept of 'the window', the dissolution of forms discovered by Kandinski, as well as the sense  of textural beauty introduced by the contemporary painters of the matière school. In essence, this involves a private display that allows the artist to make a series of paintings on canvas or cartridge paper, revealing to the viewer an ensemble of optical sensations that reflect the internal world of the artist. We should not forget - because it was forgotten during the period of aesthetic and generational reductionism of the 1980s - that Vázquez Martín was a direct heir, in the 1960s, of the national abstract movement of the 1950s. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that Juan Vázquez Martín , even when beleaguered in his career, never deviated from his artistic logic - a logic that kept alive and active non-representational forms of plastic art. He used the criterion of symbiotic expression by joining figurative and abstract elements in his overall scheme of things, coalescing them into ectoplasmatic forms, almost veils, that distinguished him in the Cuban canon of painters of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This distinguishing feature of his artistic personality is revealed in simply 'beautiful paintings' - it should be no crime to say so! - paintings in which perceptions of the environment are blended with intimate poetry . Trying to define Vázquez Martín's works of art, applying a label to his paintings from one period to another, is almost impossible, save for a tendency towards 'abstract' painting; if pressed, you might call them 'lyric' or 'art autre', 'post' or 'neo' colour paintings. His style is a skilful blend of the organic with geometry, of order with dissonance, of precise vision with suggestion. It is a whole language in itself, syncretic, and bearing a strong current of delight springing from the possibilities that he coaxes from the materials, methods and tools he uses to work with, the very  keys to his paintings. "Critique by Manuel López Oliva, Cuban Painter and Art Critic, 1996. Translated by Marigold Best and Rayner Reissenberger." Critique by Cristina Burke-Trees, Gallery Terracina director, England. "Juan T. Vázquez Martín is an artists Artist. His paintings are unquestionably of exquisite high standard, very beautiful and complete. As we say here in England, he is an artists Artist. This means in general, that only people that are used to look at art and are reasonably well educated understand the depth of his skill and complexity of his work. " Gallery Terracina Haven Banks, Canal Basin, Exeter EX2  http://www.artterracina.co.uk/Welcome.html