Carlos René Aguilera – Casa sobre las olas (House on the waves) 2007

Carlos René Aguilera Tamayo was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1965. In addition to exhibiting widely in Cuba, he has also shown his work in New York, the Dominican Republic, throughout Eastern and Western Europe and Latin America. In 1996 he won a gold medal at the Third Caribbean and Central American Biennial in Santo Domingo.

From the beginning of his professional career Aguilera has been investigating the ongoing struggle between the will to create order and the countervailing forces of chaos. His use of color has come later in his career. Prior to 1998 most of his work was in black and white because he didn’t want color to distract from his ideas. But in the last ten years or so he has grown confident enough to use it to enhance the forces he is framing. However, he remains conservative in its use. Greens and blues are dominant in most of the backgrounds of his paintings while the figures in the foregrounds are generally rendered in pinks and whites.

Early on he appropriated the image of the polar bear as his signature. The polar bear is clearly an ironic image out of place in tropical Cuba as were the Europeans who colonized the Caribbean, the African slaves they brought with them, and most recently the Russians. The role of the bear changes from painting to painting – sometimes he is merely a witness to the struggle around him, other times he is aggressively attacking other figures. Very often he is just rooting around the ruins he finds in his territory. Aguilera has called the bear “the noise in the machine,” the price exacted by nature for trying to improve on it.

Aguilera’s use of various non-painterly techniques to render the backgrounds of his paintings is evidence of his fundamentally optimistic view of nature and the human condition within it. Many of his paintings have dripping backgrounds that he creates using a batik technique. The dripping represents sap, blood, and water, primordial liquor that permeates everything. It is the life force that both erodes and regenerates. Sometimes he creates his backgrounds by carving a pattern out of Styrofoam and stamping the background onto the canvas. Other times he paints an aerial view of his native city of Santiago de Cuba as the background.

In the broadest sense, Aguilera’s paintings are about process, not ends and not means. As the Cowboy says to the Dude in the Coen brother’s movie The Big Lebowski, “Some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you.” It would be nice to see Aguilera and Cuba get the bear.

Lot#65935