JAN VALDÉS TÉLLEZ (Havana, Cuba, 1979).
"Goodbye to souls", 2020.
Oil on canvas.
Certificate of authenticity attached.
Signed in the lower right area.
Size: 100 x 120 cm.
"Farewell to Souls", is an allegory to the title of Ernst Hemingway's book, "A Farewell to Arms", where Jan Valdes Tellez proposes a dialogue between literature and artistic iconography. It belongs to the series En la nada todo cabe, with which the artist initiates the thesis he calls "art genetics", where known icons mutate into small details and create a new narrative. The artist travels through the art gallery of Art History, stripping the characters of their original context and forcing them to enter into dialogue with a new circumstance, a new scenario. The theme of death is undoubtedly one of the great obsessions of mankind of all times. Perhaps because of the famous "democracy of the afterlife" where all beings experience the same impotence, pain... equity. Between helplessness and bewilderment, in the eagerness to poeticise life and understand the incomprehensible, we have transfigured the finite into a journey, creating dissimilar metaphors to accompany understanding: Charon's boat, hell, purgatory and paradise... But this work only attempts to apprehend the instant, the beginning of the journey, the loss. Jan Valdés uses the iconography of the great masters and the mystery of their pieces to represent his own universe, diaphanous, with colours that bring us closer to the ethereal, without losing the tellurian nature of the event. Religion in consolation, the Virgin who guards the path of "the departure" but more than anything else, who serves as a consolation for those who remain, as a testimony against oblivion.
Jan Valdés Téllez began his artistic education at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Alejandro in Havana. In 2004 he graduated and began his professional career in which he has combined his pictorial work with teaching. He has participated in numerous exhibitions including the Toronto Art Fair, Canada, the Ludwin Foundation and the Fivars Galleries, Spain, among others.