Cuban Landscape

An artist who traveled not only during his formative years but long thereafter, Cuban-born painter Mario Carreño, a naturalized citizen of Chile, painted numerous landscapes of his native land in a wide range of styles. Early on, as a figurative painter, he explored the monumental style characteristic of the work of Renaissance masters whose art he saw while in Europe. During his time in Mexico, he was influenced on a formal level by the work of the muralists. Like his friend David Alfaro Siqueiros, Carreño made use of unconventional materials such as pyroxylin. In the nineteen-fifties, his art veered toward abstraction; at the end of his life, all of those experiences gave shape to a personal brand of figuration. The simple and synthetic forms in "Paisaje cubano" seem to harbor the abstraction that would later blossom in his work. While living in New York in the nineteen-forties, he returned to his native Cuba often and incorporated a number of elements of the island’s iconography into his painting. The origin of the orange light in the impasto sky in this work, then, might lie in the artist looking out his window at the sunset or in a nostalgic yearning for that Caribbean warmth on a cold winter’s day in New York.