Artists Talk with LVA: July 3, 2025

Artistas Cubanos Chévere opens at Louisville Visual Art on July 11th. Two of the artists, Carlos Gamez De Francisco & Julio Cesar joined us in the studio this week. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM/Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10 am to hear Artists Talk with LVA.

Carlos Gamez de Francisco was born in post-revolutionary Cuba in 1987, to a Cuban-Spanish mother and a Cuban-American father. He grew up in Cuba and was educated in an academic style heavily influenced by the Russian Academy. At age five, he determined, with absolute certainty, that he would be an artist. By the time he was fifteen, Gamez de Francisco was diligently painting 8 hours a day, every day. Today, he often spends 15 hours a day painting and feels “very blessed to do what I love.”His exceptional talent, hard work, and perseverance led him to earn artistic commissions and recognition.

Julio Cesar Rodríguez Aguilar was born in 1976 in Holguin, Cuba. From a very early age, he was enthusiastic about drawing. As an adolescent, he entered the Vocational School of Art Raúl Gómez Garcia, and later he entered the Professional Academy of Visual Arts in his city, graduating in the specialty of Painting, Drawing, Photography, and Artistic Weaving in 1995. Julio also went on to be a professor of the arts and involved himself in book illustration, stage and costume design, muralism, and more. 

He specifically found fascination in surrealism, which provided him with the necessary vision of what he most identified with: the mystical, the surreal, and the poetic.

Vignette: Julio Cesar Rodriguez

"Infinity Wings" by Julio Cesar Rodriguez,  Oil on canvas, 18X14in,  2017, POR

Julio Cesar Rodriguez’ surrealism is pure, in that it derives from an openness bordering on out-of-body experience: “When I'm painting I feel my mind is opened as a theater stage and my staging begins to establish itself with its own lights and shadows, colors and strokes…and then going to bed trying to sleep with that huge dark hat is the night. It is in this process where I feel still perched at that stage - floating in my paintings.”

We also are tempted to describe these most recent paintings as moving more into abstraction. The traditional surrealist’s descriptive precision with objects, time, and space has not been totally abandoned, but the vigorous kinetic swirl of his compositions partially obscure those elements, and our eye focuses on the few instances of representational clarity. The bird’s head from “Infinity Wings”, for example, or the self-portrait from “The Saved Essence of My Soul”, which makes explicit the feeling of theatricality the artist mentions. The figure might be onstage, or he might be painting a scenic design backstage.

It all reinforces the concept of alternate reality that is a keystone of the surrealist aesthetic. But the images are more than that label would allow. Rodriguez describes his work as, “a mixture of figuration and expressionism with an air of surrealism.” So we also witness his abstraction regroup into suggestions of the representational, as in “Muse Face”.

"The Saved Essence of My Soul" by Julio Cesar Rodriguez,  Oil on canvas, 48X36in,  2018, POR

“When I am creating I feel locked up in a cage with clouds. They help me hold on to the tightrope of real life and it is then that I feel the exact balance with the doors of my intellect. My love for painting holds me, makes me play attached to a brush, and it is the only time where the magicians’ savor their perfect trick.”

Rodriguez’ new solo exhibition Divine Shadows, opens on April 7th in the Revelry Boutique Gallery, with a reception that evening 7:00 to 10:00 pm, and will continue through the month of April.

Hometown: Holguin, Cuba
Education: BFA, Fine Art Academy, Holguin, Cuba
Gallery Representation: Revelry Boutique Gallery
Website: www.juliocesart.com

 

Scroll down for more images

"Muse Face" by Julio Cesar Rodriguez,  Oil on canvas, 15X15in,  2018, POR

"Spring Call" by Julio Cesar Rodriguez,  Oil on canvas, 16X20in,  2017, POR

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.