One of the main reasons I created this blog was to try and push Puerto Rican art into the spotlight in any possible, from remembering the old masters to the new emerging talent. So this is me trying!!!! I want to present to you Andres Tavarez, a young artist with a style of his own, mainly consisting of black line patters with a strong presence of reality alongside imagination. Color is present everywhere.  Some days you can see a very dark painting and other days an explosion of bright colors.  Could it be proportional to the mood of that day expressed on a canvas? Taking into consideration that many contemporary artists use this technique to express their feelings, we can surely see that Tavarez paints from the heart, a very important and key factor in the creation of good art. Here is a good example:

The basic forms, elements without decoration, simple materials, and the repetitions of structures and color give is work a sense of order and a unique quality. When evaluating Tavarez’s work, note that the transition between colors is very dramatic, as evidenced by the selection of vivid colours, often thick application of paint, and real-life subject matter.  In addition, the range and diversity that Tavarez is capable of is a very rare and important strength for any artist attempting to break away from the pack.

Tavarez is not an abstract painter.  He is not a expressionist painter.  And his work is far from realism.  Tavarez integrates all of these disciplines in the power of a few brush strokes.  He is able to move through different painting styles, and get away with it with mastery.  This makes Tavarez an exceptional contemporary artist – one whose work you can’t get tired of.

Diversity is on Tavarez’s side. But even with the ability to see the world through different paradigms, he maintains his own style.  Andres has developed a very precise style of picking out every element in the isolation of detail and arranging them in deliberate composition in space and time, the concentration on each element as equally important which was a key step towards generating a pictorial sign for each element on his work. Tavarez is the kind of artist that has a very bright future in the Puerto Rican art community.  Who knows?  Maybe in the near future we’ll even see a Tavarez work on the wall of a museum in Puerto Rico.  I think it’s just a question of time.

by Joey Medrano