La Laguna (Tenerife), Apr 11 (EFE).- The artist from Gran Canaria Antonio Padrón, born in Gáldar in 1920 and considered by critics as “the last indigenista”, has only starred in three individual exhibitions in his 48 years of life, and neither there have been many more since his death in 1968.
Two of them were in Tenerife, in 1973 and in 1976, and almost half a century later, the Fundación Cristino de Vera-Espacio Cultural CajaCanarias hosts from this Tuesday at its headquarters at Calle San Agustín 18 in La Laguna, until July 3 , the exhibition “Antonio Padrón. A vision of the everyday”.
It brings together twenty works -paintings and sculptures- made between 1954 and 1968 by this artist who adapted expressionism, cubism and fauvism to reflect rural life and the indigenism of his homeland from his peculiar style.
Antonio Padrón was “honest, upright, thoughtful and austere”, explained Christian Perazzone, curator of the exhibition.
In addition, he fled from the “hustle and bustle”, has related Mara Caballero, director of the Antonio Padrón House-Museum, hence his reluctance to solo exhibitions, which he considered as “an act of exhibitionism”.
For this reason, this exhibition, according to Mara Caballero, can be considered “historic”: not only because of the return of the artist’s work to Tenerife 47 years after the last exhibition, held in 1976 at the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts of Santa Cruz , but also because that was the last individual exhibition outside his island.
In the act of presenting this exhibition, his relative María Dolores Ramírez took the opportunity to make a portrait of the artist, always united with what is close to him.
“It is not a retrospective of the artist, it is not an anthological exhibition, it is not a sample of his career”, although there is a chronological organization in the presentation of the paintings.
This allows us to follow Padrón’s stylistic evolution, his pictorial synthesis of Canarian traditions, indigenism and insular culture, his decomposition and recomposition of everyday scenes, explained Perazzone.
Critics have always defined him as an expressionist artist marked by indigenism, with memories of cubism and without losing sight of color as an expressive element, the curator continued.
“He is an artist of his environment, of his people and his people, also of the pre-Hispanic world”, synthesizes the rural Canary Islands with a balanced and natural chromaticism, one of the most emblematic artists of the islands, although he died too young, recalled Perazzone .
Óliver González, general director of the CajaCanarias Foundation, praised the work of the artist who chose “the roads less traveled” and who fed his “enigmatic and emblematic” work with his own experiences in the north of Gran Canaria.
With this exhibition, homage is paid to a creator whose life and artistic career is closely linked to the Canary Islands, the land and its people, the domestic environment, economic activities, folklore and customs.
The exhibition will be complemented by a program of parallel activities aimed at all audiences, such as conferences, workshop visits for schoolchildren, guided tours for the general public and family workshops. EFE