Curriculum - 09 - Agustín Bejarano

Agustín Bejarano, born in 1964 in Camaguëy, began his art education at the age of 12 in the “Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas” of his hometown. At the age of 16 he entered the art-academie ENA and completed his studies at ISA in Havana. After his graduation in 1989 he became founder and head of the Graphic Workshop of Camaguëy. Since 1993 he teaches at the ISA in Havana. His works participated at 185 expositions in 23 countries. They are in 9 museum collections and received 24 awards.

“A born engraver
Agustín Bejarano succeeded in legitimating his engravings between the final years of the decade of the eighties and beginning of the nineties, being part of a group of graduates from the Higher Institute of Art who, without much conscience of the true transcendence of their conformity, propitiated a series of innovations in the procedures and representative forms of engraving, to the extent of placing it at the leading levels enjoyed up to that time by forms such as painting and installation.
It is impossible to measure the significance of that period and of that arrival, which I more than once have denominated “vindicatory”, if we do not acknowledge that an instant of equity was forged after it between the evolution of critical thought, with its top exponents in the eighties, and the absolute dominion of the traditional techniques of that craft as a result of a continuous historical development of more than four centuries.
His was perhaps one of the works that best corroborated the artistic uniqueness of that moment, since he tested the adequateness of a method which, though already known in Cuba since the beginning of the decade of the sixties, was of very infrequent use by the Cuban engravers: I refer to the print on plastic (1). With the only help of a sewing needle – not precisely a magic one, as he has made us believe afterwards – he gradually discovered with great effort a peculiar way of transferring to the acetate the traces of a precise and meticulous outlining; the formula to cleave on the hard surface – as if it were the case of applying a dry point – each one of the diminute grooves that conform the Renaissance-style figuration which has characterized him up to the present. In such a way that up to 1999, as a result of all that process of technical revelations, he had already created more than 40 impeccably printed works in quantities up to 10 copies.

With the same integrity, Bejarano succeeded in complementing that purely practical incursion with a profound meditation on the individual, society and its historical memory, in which the outlook of an intimate and at times domestic glance predominated. With it he was to contribute personally to refute the absence of proportion, of correspondence between artifice and rhetoric that the critics had blamed so much upon engraving in Cuba in previous periods. His case is still much more relevant if we take into consideration that his approaches to engraving, unlike those of almost all his fellow-countrymen, had the sole purpose of finding a means and not an end; of finding a system, a form that would enable the implementation of certain visual archetypes and their complementary compositional outlines, and particularly, that would facilitate him the search of an equilibrium between the different planes of light and shadows.

Even though I have also declared it in previous commentaries, again I would like to underline the idea that it was precisely the sense of sublimation and the apprehensibility towards the object that existed – and still exists – in each one of Bejarano’s artistic attempts, what favored the credibility and eloquence of his allegories from the very first minute of his rise in the public scene, notwithstanding the fact that they appropriated even somewhat repeated resources or alluded to phenomena that are logically reiterated in our social sphere; and particularly this was also a determinant conditioning for the ripening in the eyes of all of a spontaneous, natural way of articulation between the forms and contents of his artistic proposals.”
David Mateo