By: José Veigas Zamora

I believe it is essential to begin with the work of Antonio Rodríguez Olivares (Santiago de Cuba, 1980), an artist with whom I have been in contact for more than a decade, and whose paintings I came to know almost at the youthful dawn of his artistic production. This restless painter emerged on the Santiago art scene at the beginning of the 21st century as part of the so-called Generation 00. Being born in that period frees him, so to speak, from the burden that for far too long weighed on the visual arts of eastern Cuba, a consequence of the self-imposed isolation that meant turning away not only from the international avant-garde, but even from the Cuban one.

Tony began without looking too far back—only as much as necessary—and his generation, in a certain way, transformed the image of Santiago’s art, which until that moment had looked toward the Caribbean without a critical perspective. His work, although it may seem surprising, is essentially landscape art, only that it is a vast, expanded landscape where the different components appear displaced, and where the surrealist tradition assumes its role in a subtle yet unmistakable manner.