MADRID, Spain.- The Cuban painter Julio Matilla died in Biarritz, France, this Monday, at the age of 94. The news was released from Facebook by curator Gustavo Orta.
Orta, a collector of Cuban art in Miami and close to the Matilla family, explained to CyberCuba that the artist was hospitalized in Biarritz and died of natural causes.
“Universalized Cuban art experiences an essential pain with the loss of Julio. But his work and name remain active in his contemporary and later colleagues. As well as collectors and scholars”, Manuel López Oliva, also a painter, commented in Gustavo Orta’s publication.
While the artist Jeke Jeke pointed out: “Cuban plastic arts have lost one of the most important visual arts artists of the moment. He transformed his art into a personal taste with colors as a form of visual expression to everything that his world reached ”.
Born in Camagüey in 1928, Julio Matilla studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. Later he continued to train in Europe.
As the critic Alberto Lauro recalls in a Article for the Cuban Hispanic MagazineFrom a young age he was linked to the world of entertainment, cinema, dance and ballet. In this sense, it stands out to have been the art director of the iconic Cuban film memories of underdevelopment (1968), by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.
“Matilla is one of the living witnesses of Havana that Cabrera Infante recreates in his books and that those who lived through it keep in their memories like a treasure,” Lauro considers. Just as he points out that “with Wifredo Lam, Cárdenas, severo sarduyGina Pellón, Joaquín Ferrer, Jorge Camacho, Ramón Alejandro, Roberto García York, Eduardo Manet, José Triana and Zoe Valdesis part of the Cubans whose work has had an impact in France, following in the footsteps of the violinist Brindis de Salas and the writers Condesa de Merlin and Alba de Céspedes”.
His work, which is part of prestigious collections in Cuba, Europe, the United States and Latin America, is exhibited in New York, Miami, Coral Gables, Tampa, Paris, Bayonne, Mexico, Caracas, Maracaibo, Bogotá, Madrid, among others.
