Joaquin Ferrer was born on July 4, 1929 in Manzanillo, Cuba. In 1952, he entered the School of Fine Arts in Havana. He exhibited his works for the first time in 1954 at the National Painting Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Havana. Many personal and group exhibitions will follow in Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and the United States.
Ferrer arrived in France in 1960 on a grant from the Cuban Ministry of Education and became a French citizen in 1979. He currently lives and works in Paris.
His works are indescribable, without reference either to an existing painting, or to a realizable reality. He restores in his work not the features of a face, the configuration of a place, the content of a speech but rather the relationship of volumes to space, the vibration, the intonation of a voice, its color, its intimate singularity, which touches the deepest and which is the revealer of being. Its geometries, its curves are populated with enigmatic shadows.
He says of his painting that what we see is not what we see, that he prefers the autumnal lights and the ribbed silhouette of the trees in winter to the luxuriance of full summer, that he cannot know what his work will be like before he has drawn the first sketch and conceived it as a process of learning and discovery.
Max Ernst will say about it in Paris-Presse on January 30, 1968: “… As for young people, I pity them. How do they not feel that everything was done before them? It is wrong to make them gods before they even have time to express themselves. One of them, Ferrer, is a bit of my discovery. Far from Pop’Art, Mec’Art and their substitutes, it seems to me deeply authentic … “.
