Galería Tomas March is proud to present an exhibition by the Cuban artist Eduardo Ponjuán (Pinar del Río, 1956). Opening on Friday 26th May, the show titled Un Solo Trazo, or in other words A Single Stroke, features works from two excellent series of drawings, plus his photographic visions of the sea and also recent work on roofing felt.

Eduardo Ponjuán’s drawings, and indeed this is true for a large part of his work in general, are sophisticated accumulations of sectioned rubrics, of subtly truncated cross-referenced data, whether philosophical, literary, artistic or historic. Conceived in terms of representation, the fragment and randomness, and even what some have seen as the abysm in his work, are divested of the imperturbability of the natural surrounding from which they are taken, yet only to gain in existence insofar as they are deposited or projected as brands or new geographies in forms of becomings that allude to drawings, and drawings that allude to notations.

The crux of Eduardo Ponjuán’s work, ranging from his works with René Francisco* for the exhibition “Artista melodramático”, part of Proyecto Castillo de la Real Fuerza (1989), which are now in the collections of Peter Ludwig, Jürgen Harten, Nina Menocal, Banco de España and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes of Havana, to his pictographic actions made with roofing felt, is not so much that they respond to certain questions, rather that they constantly manage to eschew them. Any rapprochement in historical, personal or universal terms tends to be attenuated in simple and novel geographies, in calmed, fulfilled and intense orientations, in directions, entrances and exits. The pieces made with roofing felt that Eduardo Ponjuán is exhibiting in Un Solo Trazo are first of all performances and then pictographic becomings in which all one has to do is enter, or perhaps better said, access. These sophisticated pieces are at once their own performative past and their objectualized present. Eduardo Ponjuán’s logic of thought and discursivity coupled with his becomings-works conform, at present, one of the most outstanding bodies of work in current Cuban and Latin American visual practices.

Eduardo Ponjuán is now showing in Valencia with an uncompromising exhibition following a recent stint as a resident at the Brownstone Foundation (Paris), and after over twenty years of experience (he graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, in 1983) and exhibitions in galleries and institutions including Galería Nina Menocal from Mexico, I.F.A. Gallery in Berlin, Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, OR Gallery from Vancouver, the Biblioteca Central in Medellín, 106 Flatbed Gallery (Austin, Texas), in Ludwig Forum (Aachen, Germany), the Museo del Chopo (Mexico City), the Benson Gallery from New York, the Kring Ernst Gallery in Cologne, or the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Alberta, Canada).

*René Francisco Rodríguez Hernández is, together with Eduardo Ponjuán, one of the most important Cuban artists working at the moment. In the decade of the eighties he worked together with Eduardo Ponjuán in projects like “Artista melodramático”, “Ven y dame una mano”, and “Arte y confort”.