FROMETAS' FANS
Virginia Alberdi Benitez
Taken from Granma's newspaper cultural page.
Havana, Monday. January 31 the 2011
Known, for his original marc in the treatment with the abstraccionism as much as for the force stamped to his series of real or imaginary horses, Gilberto Frometa has given a twist in his career when exhibiting these days in the Origins Gallery, beside the GarcÃa Lorca Hall of the Great Theater of Havana, a sample of digital art titled From my Garden.
The surprise doesn't come, as someone could think, from the exploration on computer technology applied to the photographic images process. Perhaps not many remember that before winning prestige like a painter, Frometa worked as a graphic designer in the CUBA International magazine, in the days of glory of a publication whose today memorable articles were made accompanied by very early aesthetics designs and photographies of several of the most outstanding exponents of that specialty. Frometa himself has evoked how in that period he began his experiments with the efects of solar light printing photographies on paper, wood or raw linen canvas by contact. For example Desde el RÃo Bravo Hasta la Patagonia photoprint and water color on raw canvas 91 x 253 cm 1973. Collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana. Cuba.
Now the new change results from a disturbing poetically sense with which the artist accomplishes the process of photography and the digital manipulation to create associations. It is like if Marcel Duchamp had had the opportunity to do without of the objects to conceive its ready mades in front of the open window by the virtual reality.
But, beware, because the basis of From my Garden images possesses a real basement, or rather, a surrealism that is within the reach of our insular daily view. We cohabit in such a way with those fables areas that we don't notice them, until somebody as Frometa reveals them. (In another opportunity Eduardo Ruben went out with a camera and discovered the senseless amusement of sign that could be found in the most unexpected places in the city. In a different manner, Frometa transit through a similar route).
Everything began on the days that as part of the energetic revolution old ventilators were substituted for new ones much more efficient and thriftier. A neighbor showed him an unusual landscape: in the deposit of retired equipment there were home invented specimen, armed to begin with from the most unusual elements that overcame any fiction.
Frómeta registered that scene with his camera. But with time, and after a long stay in the Popular Republic China, in which took advantage to alternate the digital art with the painting and the engraving, decided to recycle the images of the fans and by means of legitimate appropriation resources, reinvent them a new landscape.
This is Frómeta's garden, populated with dreamd colors as the same starting point of the graphic manipulation, and crowned by fan blades which seams flowers. Works sometimes leafy and other minimum, stylized, as brief sparks of genius.
Fresh art this of Frometa that pokes the imagination and it vivifies the spectator's senses.
