A guided tour of the Minister of Culture to the exhibition “Paul Giudicelli 100 Years, Works of the Bellapart Museum” to appreciate the pieces hosted by the Banreservas Cultural Center, revealed how immense was the production of this creator, who is consecrated as the father and introducer in the country of abstract painting and ceramic painting for which he created colors, macerating red and blue glass materials.
During the guided tour, Minister Carmen Heredia heard about the exhibition from artist and art historian Myrna Guerrero Villalona, who gave a detailed overview of the aesthetic and social value of Giudicelli’s work.
Heredia appreciated the works exhibited at the Banreservas Cultural Center, where Guerrero explained that Giudicelli broke into the world of painting generationally, only because his age was older than those of other important painters who were starting out, such as Ada Balcácer and Ramón Oviedo, among others, and therefore his temperament made him introverted.
Guerrero Villalona said that Giudicelli is rightly credited with being the father of Dominican abstract painting, uniting it with popular symbolism and syncretism, besides being the one who laid the foundations of this type of art, using unpublished and orthodox methods to promote ceramic painting in paintings and murals.
He recalled how Thimo Pimentel, another precursor of Dominican artistic ceramics, has detailed that Giudicelli obtained his red and blue colors by crushing the back lanterns of vehicles (which were then made of glass) and jars of that material (blue) that he obtained from milk of magnesia containers.
First stage
In his first stage, said the expert, the artist was influenced by the works of Josep Gausachs i Armengol and Paul Gauguin, which is evident in one of the largest paintings in the exhibition, a canvas painted on two sides, in two stages of the painter’s life, at two points in his career and had never been exhibited since it is part of the Museum’s collection.
During the tour, Guerrero Villalona said that Giudicelli’s work, after half a century, continues to be contemporary and to inspire experts in the field.
Myrna Guerrero, who was accompanied by the deputy administrator of Banreservas subsidiaries, Francisco Elías, and the Cultural Manager of the Cultural Center, Mijaíl Peralta, explained that after the first figurative stage of Giudicelli’s painting, a phase of research and pictorial experimentation began in the use of his materials, which included sand in various lathes and the development of an anthropological and ethnographic theme that defined him with an artistic profile completely different from what was known.
Visits
The exhibition was inaugurated this month and will remain open until July 11. To visit it, those interested must comply with a protocol of social distancing and sanitary regulations, which include the limitation of people present enjoying the exhibition hall, said Mijaíl Peralta.
The exhibition highlights the transcendence of the work in terms of the vindication of the indigenous and black roots of the Dominican ethnic formation.
The artist lived for a long time in the Jubé section, near Boca Chica, in whose caves and sites there were many vestiges of indigenous art, graphic information that had an impact on him as an artist. His acquaintances tell that he was a creator with very personal ideas of his own, and gave as an example that he never traveled out of the country because of his panic to airplanes, so he did not agree to go to the Biennial of Paris, at the invitation of the jurors, opting to send his paintings by air.
Paul Giudicelli was born on November 13, 1921, in the Porvenir sugar mill in San Pedro de Macorís.
