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“I am my own paintings,” says Fidel Rangel Barceló (Camaguey, 1949) in an outspoken way of underscoring the undisputed connection between the artist and his works. A self-taught Barceló heard the call of painting when he was in his teens, yet he only came of age as a painter not too long ago. With a decade of fruitful art under his belt, the artist has splayed landscapes with the purest academic and realistic style, and has moved into highly expressionistic works, as many critics point out now.

But those who believe Berceló can be pigeonholed in just a single trend are dead wrong, because this painter is constantly reinventing himself and getting a sensitive shot at just about anything that crosses his mind and heart.

“I'm always innovating,” he says, “doing new things. My creativeness is immense and it's not wearing thin. My works reflect my uneasy temper, my own personality. I get to do things in a conscious manner, yet there's an unconscious part of me that pops up every so often in unexpected ways. There's also a trove of experiences inside of me, good things that have happened in my lifetime, bad things, too, happy moments, problems. All that stuff comes knocking on my door and a touch of the Cuban tar brush, the genuine Cuban flavor that's bottled up inside of me, comes out unexpectedly.”

Mr. Barceló explains he always had his mind made up to master the art of painting –rural landscapes, city skylines and dead nature- boasting great academic concentration. That borrowed him time to make his “helter-skelter” paintings of today with more creative freedom and fully aware of having been able to put more formal pieces on canvass in the past.

He has exhibited in Cuba's Quinta de los Molinos, the National Botanical Garden, the Museum of the Revolution and the Frida Kahlo Gallery in downtown Havana. His works are scattered in private collections in Sweden, Spain, Italy, the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Brazil, Portugal, France and Canada. Some of his works are also exposed in a number of local exhibits, like the one at Cuba's Ministry of Transportation, the Jose Marti National Library and Tabacuba S.A. (La Vega Marketing Co.)

Cuban art critic Froilan de Dos Lorente has said this about Barceló's works: “This artist is a sharp observer and critic of his own time and environment. He uses everyday elements that have turned out to be his own iconography and straightforward speech, the same ones he uses to put his message across, a message that's peppered with Cuban roguishness and the mind's eye of ordinary spectators.” At the same time, art historian Antonio Ante once wrote: “In the realm of arts, convincing is not always good enough; sometimes you need to surprise people, and even though spectators not always fall in the artist's ambush, the hardest part is do all that relying on life's trivial things. In that bid, Barceló made it big with mastery and unlimited loyalty in his brush touch.”

Fidel J. Rangel Barceló 1367-B 23rd Avenue on the corner of 20th Street, Vedado, Havana, Cuba. Phone: (537) 835 0568 Email: yaumara@mail.cubasi.cu Web site: www.artnovell.net