Siegfried Contemporary is excited to showcase for the first time in the UK the work of the Cuban painter Michel Pérez Pollo, in collaboration with MAI 36 Galerie, Zurich.
The artist's abstract-figurative style of painting gives him a unique position in his generation, and among artists in Cuba as a whole. When one knows his painting it is difficult not to identify some of his pictures. Pérez Pollo places significant emphasis on the importance acquired by the work process. For him, sculpture and photography precede the pictorial act, since the artist builds models or mock-ups, with either Plasticine, Stones or other materials which he later photographs in order transmit them from there to the canvas.
Pollo's works are a sort of tribute to the Avant-garde since he assimilates, from an entirely contemporary perspective, the great contributions of modern art. Simultaneously, the metaphysic element characterizing his paintings act as reminiscent of the surrealist movement. His works are wrapped in an aura of mystery which makes the viewer question the existence of those forms and the way in which they reached their present state; their existence seems possible, although reason indicates it is not so.
Michel Pérez Pollo's particular style of painting is bold, often lavish in his application of the fluid paint, and therefore reminiscent of revolutionary murals, depictions imbued with messages. He focuses on the superordinate, the human-personal, so that his paintings seem like expressions of a new humanism.
For this show Pollo has created two new series that start from a common idea: the realization of forms from chaotic or arbitrary concepts. One is "Seven days of luck", a "series" composed by a single artwork made by 7 canvases, which also gives the title to the exhibition because according to his opinion the meaning of " luck " implicitly refers to the idea of the casual and unplanned. For this artwork, he has selected the winning lottery numbers in a week and based on the mathematical sums of these numbers he constructed paper figures, which he then used as a model for the paintings. For the other series, to which belong all the other works of the exhibition, he used the same process but building forms from the sum of "climate parameters". Figures derived from temperature, relative humidity or atmospheric pressure, among others, become patterns for the creative act of setting the lengths on each stretch which will give form to a figure.
Michel Pérez Pollo was born in 1981 in Manzanillo, Cuba, where he also lives and works. His works have been exhibited at various Ibero-American venues and occasionally in Europe. Gallery Mai 36 in Zurich has had two solo shows with him.
For more information on the artist please visit: here