MADRID, Spain.- The artists Cubans Maikel Sotomayor Vargas and Richard Somonte Llerena inaugurate this Saturday in Madrid the exhibition “Two of Swords”.
The exhibition, a selection of more than 30 small and large format works, was curated by Nayr López García and Beatriz Bullón Aguiar. It will be possible to visit until April 3 of next year at the Richard Somonte Studio, located at number 7, Plaza Vara de Rey, in the Spanish capital.
“Next May 20 we will present a project that we have been working on for several months: ‘Dos de Espadas’, a two-person painting exhibition,” he had announced in his social networks somonte.
According to the curatorial note, the exhibition “proposes a dialogue between these two problems of Cuban painting, a confrontation between both ideo-aesthetic attitudes that resort to very different imaginaries, but with the same intention: to expose reinterpretations of those stories that have contributed to the construction of history. The exhibition invites us to reflect on characters, situations and contexts, and on the way in which they have been understood within that great Story as winners and losers”.
Speaking to Rialta Newsthe curator explained that the two most common uses of the two of swords card are the practice of tarot and the brisca game or “death to three”, as it is known in Cuba.
“In the language of the tarot, this card announces a confrontation, a fight, but it also means waiting for another’s decision. Within the dynamics of the brisca, although it does not have a numerical value that accumulates ‘so many’ for whoever owns it, it is capable of changing the ‘stick’ that is on the table, the symbology that has been dominating up to that moment”, adds the information.
Richard Somonte, 32 years old and born in Havana, graduated in painting from the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts. His exhibitions include Somonte (2017) and God’s Architecture (2018) at the Carmen Montilla Gallery in Havana. While Maikel Sotomayor (Granma, 1989) has exhibited his work in Belgium, New York and Canada, among others.
