About MONTEBRAVO
Excerpts from the exhibit catalog)

Joan Crystal Pearlman, Instructor in Folk Art History, The New School University, New York City

José de Jesús García Montebravo was born in Cienfuegos, on the south coast of Cuba, about four hours from Havana, on October 15, 1953. He works there still, making paintings. He has had twelve one-man shows and taken part in more than two hundred group show(s in Cuba and abroad. Since 1984, he has received fifty-eight prizes and fifteen honorable mentions for his work.  

Montebravo is self taught, and therefore could be called a folk artist, or intuitive artist. He could also be called a visionary artist because of the spiritual landscape of his themes. However, having a well-grounded sense of his art world and western art in general (from which he draws part of his inspiration), it becomes more difficult to categorize him. He recounts that not having had art training seemed unfortunate at one time. Now, however, he considers it an advantage, one which has given him more freedom to express himself.

Montebravo's paintings have at least three varying styles.  Some are portraits of Afro-Cuban orishas (Santería deities) with their symbols and attributes, whom he has fused with real Afro-Cuban women in lush costume. He calls these his hijas del monte (perhaps a play on his name), and he brings to these an attention to detail with a psychological focus on the somewhat abstracted faces. He says he takes advantage of the possibilities of working with the full-skirted dresses to include collage with actual fabric which he then paints. Another of his earlier styles reverberate with bold black and white linear design in patterns of animals, Cuban plant life and religious figures. His strong sense of design is most apparent in these compositions which fill every inch of the surfaces.  

His more recent works move into fantasies, other worlds where people and animals blend and then combine with circus and folkloric elements, nature in the forms of lizards, jicoteas (hicotees, fresh water tortoises), roosters, the moon and Afro-Cuban symbolism to draw the viewer into a mesmerizing realm. He himself describes his themes as coming from both Cuban and universal painting, and his compositions as "saturated with different elements from nature and folklore that are fused through color and form." This later series moves from the single focus of the early orishas and from the unifying pattern and design to a fragmented multiple focus employing strongly symbolic, bizarre and mysterious figures who only occasionally relate to each other. They leave the viewer wanting to know more about the unfamiliar realms and, perhaps, rituals they are observing. Always, there is invention and emphasis on a strange, ethereal beauty.