Certainty of Holguin artist Manuel Gamayo

Drawing, as a form of graphic expression, is one of the oldest and most used by mankind to transmit projects, ideas, emotions and thoughts. It is the basis of any work in question, the inherent matrix of the artist, and that is why master draftsmen have been fundamental for the beginning of any visual artist’s career as well as for the development of later techniques. One of the illustrators and cartoonists that the province has given birth to is Manuel Gamayo Cordero, who brings us the personal exhibition “Manu Abril” almost at the end of the year and give the last bells to close a work cycle.

A passage through more than fifty years of work with a hundred pieces distributed among individual drawings, oil paintings and collages is the proposal that Gamayo makes as a reminder of his long career as a draftsman, from sketches made in the Academy of Fine Arts back in the seventies to the calm and firm strokes of more contemporary drawings.

The exhibition, first intoxicated with the music of guitarist Eliezer Travieso and then with the artist’s own anecdotes about how drawing has been part of his life, gave way to the other self of the author, as Bertha Beltrán Ordóñez, curator of this personal exhibition, assured that from the entrance you already have the course and the discovery of a passionate Gamayo and lover of poetry, capturing in his drawings the artistic name of his works, such is the case of “…”. One of your drawings I could not let go”, “My verse will grow under the grass”, “This is how I fill my hours”, among other ideas that allude to the romance between pen, charcoal, pencil, oil and canvas.

This fascination for the human figure, especially the female one, strengthens the idea of the creator, of the Creole da Vinci, of the representation of the material state of the body and of the fantasy with which Manuel Gamayo Cordero’s imaginary flies, beyond the verse turned into image.

That glimpse of freedom with which the artist draws, without regard for nudity, perfect and imperfect body that is carried away by the precise stroke of the pen, the path of the ink that molds a face, fingers, long hair that admire Velázquez, Dürer, to the surface of well-formed breasts that ask the beginning of life, time, the secret under the skin, the guilt of the flesh exposed only in the mind of the viewer.

Synchrony between sketch, phrase, mosaic woven between images decodable by the illustrative potential of the exhibition in question, giving way to a whole section of collages that intertwine in time, “in the same scenario”, in honor of “a precursor”, “the sad one”, the “seagull” without feathers, the memories of past times.

Perhaps, these are the best of the whole exhibition because they are a little more conceptual and not as illustrative as the rest of the works.

In addition, a space dedicated to the “portraits” as he calls them, is intimate, dedicated to friends and acquaintances of the author, the half-caricatured representation of these people who share his daily life.

Without leaving behind, of course, the figure of Don Quixote, conservative, Spanishized, Castilianized. The vision also of the master Martí, between torn verses, in homage to literature, to the limpid of the letters, to the “free verses”.

This work is to be appreciated with calm and moderation, to discover the secrets of the collages or to appreciate the technique of the drawings themselves, regardless of the stage, without the young or the mature, it is a gift of years without being a path; it is the certainty of knowing how to be a draftsman. / By Yeema Martínez Yee – student of journalism.