Waltman Ortega Fine Art is pleased to present “Dayron Gonzalez | Selected Works”, a solo exhibition of work by Cuban-American artist Dayron Gonzalez. Comprised of oil paintings selected from the period between 2017 and 2021, this is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Waltman Ortega Fine Art.

Dayron Gonzalez was born in 1982 in Havana, Cuba. He graduated San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. He’s been exhibiting his work internationally in North America and Europe. Gonzalez’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, and in private and corporate collections worldwide. He is represented by Waltman Ortega Fine Art in Miami and Galerie Olivier Waltman in Paris. Dayron Gonzalez lives and works in Miami, FL.

Dayron Gonzalez’s artworks are intense reflections on the nature of representation, public and private memory, the construction of history, and the shifting nature of identity. Gonzalez focuses on the psychological power of painting in works of startling visual impact and conceptual resonance, characterized by dynamic and mutable formalism.

The subject is humanity – portraits, self-portraits, anonymous figures, historical figures, figures in nature, figures in interiors. Gonzalez’s figures embrace both the profundity and the ennui of existence – popes and presidents, politicians and partygoers, children and the elderly. We feel the melancholy isolation of these figures, balancing static silence and gestural cacophony, underlining the dichotomy implicit in painting – realism versus illusion, image versus meaning. Through his work in general, and his portraits in particular, Gonzalez interlaces visual metaphors and values of the past with those of the present. Gonzalez reveals an intensive self-dialogue — an honest explication of the banalities of life, untidy thoughts, and everyday experiences. Unconcerned with the finesse and preciosity of detail, Gonzalez focuses on how the exterior can reveal the interior. Each painting grows out of successively reworked images, buried beneath subsequent marks and erasures. This labored and deliberately messy process scars Gonzalez’s figures and robs them of their identity, individuality, history and memory.

Blurring, slashing, dripping and erasing are conceptual constructs Gonzalez employs to ignite connections. Subjects become provocative, emotional images of transient beauty as well as elegiac suffering. These paintings distill the energy of restless, fragmented thought into ordinary chaos, part imagination and part surrounding world, mirroring the shifting, unpredictable nature of life.