Roger Toledo: Unpainting

Roger Toledo conceptually approaches painting in an attempt to deconstruct the nature of the paintings he examines, all validated by their presence in museums: in an attempt to extract and separate the pigments from the forms that contain them. The pieces of the contemporary artist (R. Toledo) reflect and conceptually approach formalist criticism and the valorization of painting as an art object.

For this series, paintings from the Cuban art collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts were chosen to create a history of color in Cuban painting. Toledo says: “I chose to work on Days at the Museum with pieces that perhaps are not the most recognized within the historiography of Cuban art. My criteria were more practical and personal: they are all works of a wide chromatic value, that regardless of whether they are the most representative of their time or not, reflect their authors' spirit.” With the goal of summarizing each of these masterpieces, the artist picks twenty-five colors and reproduces them in hue and technique in an abstract -geometric- composition. Toledo's renditions carry the color ambiance of the originals, in proportion to their presence within the original forms; he explores the narrative capacity of color, and a work's spatial structure.