Artist: Michel Pérez Pollo

Mai 36 Galerie presents new paintings by Cuban-born, Madrid-based painter Michel Pérez Pollo in his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Michel Pérez Pollo works with objects – not as fixed forms, but as mutable structures that he observes, studies, and re-imagines, using painting as a space for speculation.

In Double Gaze, Michel Pérez Pollo proposes a game of resistance – one that challenges the viewer to seek out similarities and differences, tricks and devices, errors and accuracies, the fractal and imaginary possibilities of a matter that unfolds before us into two. Like twin souls that bifurcate, like the very beginning of a human embryo, when a single cell divides into two, and so on... We never know which is the original and which the copy; nor will we ever know which is primary and which secondary. And this initial doubt draws us in: we fall easily into his web of artifices, into his diluted glazes where humidity seems to linger in the atmosphere, despite an architectural flatness that encloses us as if within cells of symbolic experimentation, as though the artist – after years living in Spain – were quietly challenging the Andalusian Baroque masters he so admires, evoking embryonic mini- Zurbaráns in order to capture the same climate of memory.

In these times of vertiginous speed – a phrase that has become almost habitual – encountering a metaphorical “handbrake,” something made by hand that, in a sense, speaks of the hand itself and manages to bring us to a halt, is a rare luxury. For a trained eye, it becomes evident that the artist achieves this with a particular ease, a lightness, a playfulness of gesture that is distinctly his own, because he takes pleasure in it. And there is, perhaps, a quiet pride in his ability to suspend us. To anesthetize us, so that we may look at these objects – objects that do not define us, yet somehow do, in reminding us that they are things we are not. Nor are they our enemies; they remain simply a mystery. And what is unknown should not be feared, for if one studies it and comes to know it, one may even come to love it. Such is the beauty of an art that captures both our gaze and our time, leading us to wish that our encounter with it might be endless. Even when these forms seem to look at us sideways, almost shyly, we should not mistake this for innocence or simplicity of intent; within this “double gaze,” a reservoir of knowledge awaits discovery as an act of courage.

For the very act of painting in the twenty-first century is, in itself, an act of courage.

Michel Pérez Pollo (born 1981 in Manzanillo, Cuba, currently living and working in Madrid) studied at the Escuela Profesional de Artes Plásticas in Holguín and at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Recent institutional solo shows include the Brownstone Foundation in Paris, France (2021) and the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba (2018). His work is held in public and private collections worldwide, including the Museo de Bellas Artes, Havana; the Ella Cisneros Fontanals Collection, Miami; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; the Centro Tomás y Valiente, Madrid; the Uli Sigg Collection, Switzerland; the Centro Espacio Arte, Panama City; El Espacio 23, Miami; the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; and the Brownstone Foundation, Paris.

Text by Omar Pascual Castillo