Michel Perez Pollo at Timothy Taylor Gallery
“Bolero” presents new paintings by Cuban-born, Madrid-based painter Michel Pérez Pollo at Timothy Taylor Gallery, New York. The exhibition features large- and small-scale paintings of abstracted glyph-like forms in rich, earthen hues.
The title “Bolero” is drawn from the eponymous Cuban musical genre, which developed from the romantic folk poetry of troubadours in late nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba.
Pérez Pollo drew particular inspiration from the traditional love song “Longina,” whose lyrics describe a mysterious, sensitive woman. Each painting abstracts a syllable from the song’s lyrics, with letter forms that shift in and out of recognition.
These works connect the emotional resonance of juxtaposed forms to that of juxtaposed sounds, words, and phrases. Each syllable—reflected in the works’s titles, Sion, Rio, Ojos, Lon—is depicted with unique chromatic and formal relationships that lend layers of significance to the words they form. Together, these paintings suggest the lyrics, as well as the feelings, of “Longina.”
Like in his other series inspired by the change of seasons or Cuban poets, Pérez Pollo approaches painting as a poetic act, seeking order from chaos. His process involves multiple materials and media: he first creates improvised miniature plasticine and found-object models, which he arranges, lights, and photographs.
These subtly biomorphic forms are posed in unlikely configurations—such as a ball or a comma balanced atop another rounded shape, or an elongated form defying its own weight. These objects aren’t meant to stand on their own, but in the context of the painting, they are suspended in precarious balance.
The artist then transfers his photographed assemblages to canvas before applying paint, allowing chance, spontaneity, and intuition to guide his brushwork. Placing his compositions in hermetic, dramatically lit spaces, he meticulously renders highlights and shadows to create an almost sculptural sense of contour. The resulting paintings possess a photorealistic quality while still showing the hand’s gestures, a combination that feels both vital and dynamic.
Michel Pérez Pollo (*1981 in Manzanillo/Cuba, lives and works in Havana) creates his works in two stages: first, he makes a model of clay and found objects, which serves as a template for his painting in the second stage.
Pérez Pollo always works on two levels: a painted area in the lower third of the picture acts as a base for the seemingly three-dimensional form in the foreground. The resulting figurative situations and sculptural portraits have a surreal and poetic effect.
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