Douglas Pérez Castro
Cuba has been defined by the third discoverer of the Island, Don Fernando Ortiz, as an "ajiaco", due to the plurality of cultures that converge in the nation. To capture this multiplicity of essences in art is not a task for beginners and even more so because it is a complex and diverse country.
In this context, Douglas Pérez Castro has found an effective and elegant way to reflect our traditions. He builds dialogues with a strong historical charge, where it is possible to notice a rigorous exercise of imagination and at the same time a meticulous study of who we were.
Humor is another of his resources in art, it allows him to brighten "the moment" in front of his works, because life is built from little by little, from moments of happiness and at the end of the day it is preferable to remember what is pleasant.
Douglas seems to paint in a big way, without fear that the big format could distort his proposal. Thus the gaze grows and with it the thought. It is also worth noting that the small and medium format with the same talent dominates.
His creative cosmos is not limited only to the historical, since it is capable of unfolding and giving life to an alienated reality, dystopian and different from the established canons of societies.
Works such as Troyano, Picazzo, La República Habanera and La Ciudad de las Oportunidades -among others found within the catalogue of Maxima Gallery-Studio- have a powerful visual load due to their content and their relationship with fiction. Man, tired of so much daily life, finds here an open door to another world, an oasis to make his imagination more fertile.
Pérez Castro is also a natural conversationalist, an artist who seems to dominate time in his favor and produce a large number of works, each one different in its own way from the sensory, the utopic and the rational. The artist is one of those strange beings attracted by the experiments that can emanate from art.
Douglas Pérez Castro's phrase: "The process of painting requires you to spend a long time eating yourself, in a kind of autophagy".