Nelson Dominguez. The Silence of Earth.
By Tony Pinera
After you stop looking at Nelson Dominguez's work, and look at it again, an unmistakable impression warns you that you are faced with something original and even primitive. Something unyielding, beyond style, that seems to be of paramount importance to art.
Absorption, deep fantasy of matter, resistance. And if one looks through so many fulfillments and attempts, over the abyss that separates the now from everything that was before, resistance acquires a metaphysical, almost mythical dimension: it becomes the affirmative survival that announces the final word has not yet been said. And that, despite all revelations, something remains within a sacred secret, overcast by silence. It is the silence of the earth, of the Cuban landscape, which the artist knows to perfection.
Nelson Dominguez (Baire. Santiago de Cuba, 1947) is like a chemist who looks for reactions and tirelessly investigates into matter. An experimenter who, with talent and luck, has tried his hand at the most varied techniques resortings to interesting expressive resources. In them, he finds the right words to "convey" messages to the onlooker, availing of any means: clay. glass, wood, metal, fabrics, paper. It could be said, surfaces cannot resist his artistic onslaughts.
In the immense laboratory (Art), the creator pays no attention to the limits between artistic expressions. For, since the beginning, research/experimentation were a part of his work. The mores of and the nostalgia for his native countryside shaped his artistic visions.
From his roots, Nelson approached the rural world with humor, delicacy and poetry, The natural and the human entwine in his works, in an atmosphere of stories and legends reminiscent of the path cleared by Victor Manuel, Amelia Pelaez, Carlos Enriquez, the pioneers of the Cuban avant-garde. But he faces it with originality My memories of the Sierra Maestra live in me because for someone who has titled the soil since childhood, the countryside is like the past/present constantly within oneself: the land, nature, are always with me wherever I go, says the artist. At the time of the triumph of the Revolution -he adds- we lived in Caney de las Mercedes, in the Sierra Maestra, and that's how I began to study at the "Camilo Cienfuegos" school. There was a painting workshop there. One day, out of curiosity. I went in. I liked it and stayed doing ceramics. I also engraved and painted. Curiously enough. I've kept on doing those three things which I love deeply. Many adventures await Nelson, who still paints with his same, original passion. He know he has left many miles behind him and works at his studio like an artisan and a magician, his back turned to every recipe designed to tame fantasy.
Courtesy of Magazine Habanera

"(...) An artist who captures the special essence of Cuba as a country, as well as one who understands the potency and evolution of art, and wo has the capacity to sense the inherent beauty in people from all times and places."
Manuel Lopez Oliva, painter and art critics