Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present S.O.S CUBA, featuring new paintings by Afro-Cuban artist Tomás Esson. Esson has always been a fierce critic of the social realities of Cuba, titling this exhibition in solidarity with those still living under the repressive government whose conditions on the island have severely worsened during the pandemic.
Tomás Esson was born in Havana, Cuba in 1963. He studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte. Esson is considered one of the most important artists of his generation to have emerged in Cuba, becoming a central figure in the decade’s renaissance of Cuban Art. His first exhibition in Havana, A Tarro Partido II (with Broken Horn II), was shuttered by local party officials citing Esson’s grotesque representation of venerable icons of the Cuban Revolution, such as Che Guevara. This repression resurfaced in the mid-1980s as Cuban artists began more critically addressing the social realities of life in Cuba. Esson participated in some of the most important exhibitions and biennials in Cuba and Latin America – his works later began to be exhibited and collected in Europe. In 1990, he left Cuba and moved to the United States.
Over the course of three decades, Tomás has developed from figurative mythological to a hybrid style to an almost completely abstract style. The artist’s solo exhibition at the gallery focuses on nine works from his Miami Flow series spanning two rooms: the primary gallery showcasing a diverse range of large-format compositions and the secondary gallery focused on four medium format, green-hued works with titles that allude to subtropical wetlands.
Esson’s Miami Flow series couples abstraction and vegetation with an increasingly dynamic, gestural energy. Started in 2015, the early paintings began as isolated fragments of landscapes prevalent in earlier figurative paintings, immersing the viewer in botanical depictions. Sexualized flora emerged in a variety of pictorial environments progressing into pure abstraction, disconnecting from evident representation. As this series progresses, Esson has amplified the lively exertion of oil on canvas with dense applications, heightened velocity, and coloration.
This exhibition follows Esson’s major solo museum presentation The GOAT at the ICA Miami as well as his first solo exhibition in New York in over a decade. Tomas Esson’s work is housed in the permanent collections of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico, among others.
