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Artist: Tomás Esson

EKELE KWA presents five new large-scale abstractions by Tomás Esson, marking Esson’s first presentation at the gallery’s TriBeCa location at 57 Walker Street.

Tomás Esson, a Cuban artist of Jamaican descent, has been an essential voice of the contemporary Afro-Caribbean diaspora since his very first exhibition in Havana in 1988, which was censored and closed by Cuban authorities. As an artist living in exile, Esson connects disparate aesthetic and political traditions, ranging from subversive caricature to the concrete abstraction of modernist Cuban painting.

The title of the exhibition comes from the Igbo term meaning “Greetings! O!” and is commonly used in Cuba in its Afro-Caribbean or Hispanicized variation of the phrase, “equelecua!”, which is used to express “thank you!” or “that’s right!” Perhaps Esson’s proclamation is of his own freedom; his right and destiny to make art.

The deftness of execution in Esson’s paintings, both in form and color, evokes the visual languages forged by the American and European abstract painters before him such as Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning. Esson’s dynamic and liberatory abstractions have established a singular vocabulary, one originally born from a figuration that has since evolved from a Surrealist socio-political narrative to an emotionally charged, intuitive, and timeless visual patois.

Tomás Esson (b. Havana, Cuba, 1963) lives and works in Miami, Florida. Esson graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, in 1987. His work was showcased in a number of controversial exhibitions in the late 1980s, as he became a central figure in the decade’s renaissance in Cuban art and began to exhibit internationally. In 1990, he left Cuba and has since then lived in Miami and New York City. In 2020-21, Esson was the subject of a 30-year career retrospective The GOAT held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. His work is in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico, among others.