Yohy Suarez’s Spiritual Purification

By Esther Zoza

HAVANA TIMES – A new arts center, located on the corner of Teniente Rey and Havana Streets in Old Havana, opened its doors at the end of last year, after undergoing long renovation works.

The Espacios Creativos gallery has had Yohandry Suarez Pena’s exhibition “Caprichos”  (whims) on the program, scheduled through the end of March. 

The viewer’s eye wanders in this huge gallery, where Yohy’s paintings astonish us with their grotesque overload and misdirected neglect. Something like spiritual purification reigns in these images, where creatures with deformed faces and eyes invite us to devise different readings in spaces that are marked by time.

With an unusual use of color, the paintings seem to bleed from an inexact place within the artist’s own memory. Telling us that the color goes hand in hand with the dementia that lurks in these afflicted souls who crowd around the different works.  

This painter’s fantastic imagery doesn’t cease to amaze us as we walk from one painting to the next, making the experienced viewer think back to some of Goya’s paintings, to Fabelo’s restless and grotesque beings, to the entourage of strange and humanized beings in Pedro Pablo Oliva’s work, and of course to the unforgettable Antonia Eiriz. 

Becoming a ledger of a time that is impossible to conceive today, Caprichos is an exhibition which shouldn’t be missed by any arts lover with a capital A.