ReseñArte
By Mayra Sorondo
Luis Abreux – Brightest Dreams
September 7th to October 20 2011
At Talento Bilingüe de Houston
As a clear example of the delicious Latin American diversity that characterizes Houston, Talento Bilingüe begins its new season hand-in-hand with Cuban artist Luis Abreux.
In the exhibit, titled Brightest Dreams, the artist promenades us through ten oil and acrylic canvases brimming with vivid colors conveying an evocative Caribbean look.
In response to the partial or total disappointment and the dilemma of existentialism that affects so many today, Abreux poses the question of social and economic troubles and the current Cuban inequality through surrealist and magical realism techniques.
The Cuban artistic movement of the 90‟s -Abreux‟s generation- was characterized by the representation of a hard-bitten and wry reality; a time to paint everyday garb and deception. A recurring character in Abreux‟s work is the harlequin, a classic Commedia dell’Arte symbol of servitude and poverty.
On a historical note, his painting „59‟ refers to a transition, the overthrown Batista dictatorship, making the year of the “Revolution” driven by a discourse of progress, anti-imperialistic and democratic change. “Victory and Justice” was everybody‟s dream and slogan.
In “Bike and Ron”, it is clear that “Ron” (Spanish for „rum‟) is causing the „blindness that allows the rider to escape from his surrounding reality. On the other hand, it leads us to infer that both, tobacco and rum –elements also present in his piece “Smoking”- are part of Cuba‟s national identity.
The theme of inequality is reflected in “Rich in Havana”. In this work, we can see characters that either move by themselves or are carried by others, as shown in “Taxi”; in contrast, we also see that the large majority of the population travels crowded from one side to another by means of “Crazy Cars”. “All Green” represents pollution, the damage cause to the environment and all living creatures on planet earth. Green may also stand for the army‟s uniform, the color of the oppressors still defending the policies of a regime that, as Silvio Rodriguez said, „should re-evolve to survive‟ (a play of words with the Spanish words for „revolutionize‟ and „re-evolve, as on evolving or transforming again).
Humans, in response to hardship, might try to hide behind mask and apparel. In “Truth”, we can see how the heavy burden of disguising who we are can lead to collapse and blindness.
In his work “Hope” the artist presents a state of mind achieved through illusion; a new transition to an unknown, but much needed change that would always be somehow „better‟. Through the use of wings, sails, propellers, wheels and ropes attached to their bodies and objects, the artist permits its characters the possibility of reaching that idealized, dreamt place.
Luis Abreux allows us all to take flight, to take a hold an imaginary reality that lets us enjoy the opportunities and abundance that only a few can relish
............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Abreux's talent was so prodigal that the state enabled him to receive a Master's in Fine Art from the most prestigious academy in Cuba the revered San Alejandro Academy in Havana specializing in painting and subliminal techniques. San Alejandro is an incubator for Cuba's most famous artists, like Tomas Sanchez and Wifredo Lam. He has had numerous one man shows including the 1997 Havana Biennial and is a member of the Asociacion Hermanos Saiz and ACEA Asociacion Catalana de Entidades Artisticas. His art is so fascinating due to its enormous range, diversity and sophistication. Some works are exquisitely esoteric while others have a naive feel. All of it is fresh and most arresting. He is working within dynamic social forces and this is dramatically evident. They capture infinitesimally thin slices of life exquisitely, and rather modestly. Overall the works are personal history paintings and all exhibit life affirming theatricality. After decades of near anonymity, contemporary Cuban artists are asserting their presence -- and winning acclaim like the coveted "Miro" in Spain. Likewise, important auction houses like Sotheby's are offering and receiving Picasso's contemporary, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam for over $1.2million. Museums and galleries in Paris, New York and Tokyo are also showing interest at an all-time high, contemporary Cuban art is finally being given its due and younger artists are coming to the forefront. Like Cuba's own popular music; salsa, mambo, cha, cha, cha etc., Cuban art is receiving serious attention. Abreux's work forms a magnificent spiritual tour de force for the twenty-first century. Nance Frank (Gallery on Greene) Key West, Florida
.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Abreux paints while the end of the world is coming over.
No other sentence would summarize in any more accurate way the contradictory spirit of this end and beginning of a century than a popular Cuban expression which invites: "Enjoy how you can, as the end of the world's coming over". In an evident paradox, the apocalyptic and the self-affirmative things, life and death, Eros and Thanatos are cooked together, seasoned in a sort of some sarcastic, hedonist insolence. And only a few looks, in the universe of Cuban plastic arts, have been able to capture such a spirit so deeply, and to undress it in their canvases and cardboards as the genius of Luis Abreux has done. A statement like this would seem disproportionate on presenting the work of a young painter, all the more when one is living a moment of true flowering of visual arts in the Island, where talent germinates everywhere and extends its branches and roots beyond our frontiers. And even, to make still more questionable the asseveration, the proposals of the last two decades that have been included under the capricious label of "New Cuban Art", amid an enormous thematic and stylistic diversity, have been, without a doubt, characterized by the intention to carry out a sociological investigation of the reality and to penetrate into the essential motivations of individual and social behaviors. Where does Luis Abreux's peculiarity have its roots, then? Abreux (Havana, 1971) graduated at San Alejandro Academy of Art in Havana as a substantial part of the artists contributing to the abovementioned boom of the Cuban plastic arts and its recognition; to this artistic education he adds his experience at a Workshop on Subliminal Techniques in Art and Publicity, which possibly has contributed to the level of suggestion and subtexts that characterizes his works. The key to this question lies not only here, however, but in the discoveries of his personal search, in his own selection of the means and codes he uses for his artistic expression, and in the sagacity and lucidity assisting him when answering private questions on his role as an artist, as a human being and therefore as a main character of an experience that is intimate but also interhuman and is inserted in the social medium and in a certain reality. By resorting to a kind of a melange (the deliberate Gallicism here does not respond to an intention to sweeten, but to an intention of dignifying a proposal which, expressed in Castilian, could carry in itself the somewhat depreciated term "jumble") where he merges with perfect coherence diverse resources coming from the fields of caricature, humorous vignette, comics or children's books illustration, Abreux gives account of that spirit of the time, which some prefer to call "post-modern condition", through a stylistic mannerism whose parodic, critic intention saves it from frivolity. Unquestionably estranged from certain so-called manias of the most contemporary art, such as that denominated "the return of the aesthetic paradigm of art", and without any intention of making deconstructive juggling with tradition, or of resorting to the nouvelle vague of hyperrealism, but using other codes also typical of him, such as a fondness for pastiche and kitsch touch, and by means of a kind of a new surrealism (and I use this term because no other one comes to my mind to name such imaginative overflow), tropical and colorist, playful and aggressive; Luis Abreux configures a very particular plastic substance whose inspiration source we should not look for in any "telluric current" or in "unconscious archetypes", much less in the sublimations of imagination or in the concealing artifice of the dreams. Rather we should search for that among the daily types, the common man passing by our side by the streets who, submerged in the often invisible traps of existence, is engaged in a quarrel between the defense of his dignity and the incidental pressures of survival. The characters parading through his pieces -in that such personal retable of the world he has constructed- are grotesque, but at the same time they are close and intimate (a paradox present in every artist whose vision, even if critic, of the human condition, is marked in its ultimate essence by Understanding); they exhibit such lightness and hedonism, such desublimated and even perverse eroticism, such obscene materialism, such deceitfulness and pretended dissimulation, and even sometimes such underground anguish and pain seemingly hiding their irony, jeer, lightness, worldliness and their reluctance to face the transcendency and the utopian ideals of current times. The anatomical distortion, the deformity of the figures or the animal anthropomorphism, the hysteroid overperformance of the expressions, the predilection for party and show, the shamelessness in the attitudes, the effrontery that doesn't avoid ridicule, are visual constants of a production that has also generated -perhaps as an alternative- different characters with a certain romantic impression, inclined toward the manifestation of kindness, spirituality and love to the other, where the form chosen by the author to capture them stands away from the exaggeration that characterizes caricature, also from excessive, bizarre tonalities, and assumes a more idealized figuration by using less aggressive, attenuated, sweetish color that brings it nearer to the ingenuousness of the infantile look. But the ones and the others form a unit marked by the harmony and the internal consistency of a perfectly recognizable proposal, and even more: both sides supplement one to another and meet further away in a deep look, exempt of any diatribe or any devastating or unappealable judgment, reaching the wisdom of recognizing that we all, absolutely, share a common condition. -Rafael Grillo CUBAHORA Electronic Review (Internet) Luis Abreux, City of Havana, 1971.
...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
The painter himself admits he cannot get rid of figuration; he admits that he feels the absolute necessity to refer to the human figure and he even seeks to make us believe that it is all about human figures. In fact, these zoomorphic, phitomorphic, even amorphous, even more, "anythingmorphic" figures are by no means anthropomorphic. They result from the conjugation of unreal anatomical forms with caricatures of different states of mind and the sensation of the absurdity of the characters. The drama of the intimate, the daily life is demythicized, man is alienated from his true atmosphere and placed in the "kermesse", the fair of his feelings, of his dreams, of his most illogical ideas. Yesterday he could have seen, or have believed to see that the hole on the wall was speaking and that a cooked potato was responding to it, but he rejected the idea because it seemed unlikely to him. When he arrived at the fair he found them commenting about the incredulous attitude the artist had had the previous day while serving him a pair of looking glasses on a tray. This is possible thanks to mock and parody; thanks to the capacity of exteriorizing that jester's quota we all have inside, and which we hide in compliance with old taboos. Caricature, deformity, collages of unexpected attitudes help to assimilate this world of comics and cartoon stories. He is also helped by the gracility of the line, the tactile value of the painting, the coloristic atmosphere. The exterior of the objects and the sensoriality of the forms are nothing but a pretext, a lure that we believe will make us laugh after making us swallow the bait and depict the mental attitudes of the characters; thereby demonstrating that life is, for many, the result of exaggeration of pain and exacerbation of permitted self-compassion. -Silvia Llanes Torres, Exhibition HAVANAN YOUNG PAINTING Dramatic Society of Maracaibo, Venezuela, August 1997.
.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
This (collective) exhibition tries to rehabilitate a type of painting to which we are not very accustomed, a painting coming to us from beyond the ocean, a new form of emotion and perception of things. (...) Luis Abreux (...) brings us a mental universe not very well-known so far, it is the mental universe of his land, Cuba, an island where painting is not a luxury but a thing that emerges from under the stones, among the trees and above the roofs of Havana. Cuban painting is an outlook on life, perhaps a response to life, in any event, a scream in the face of the world. We see it this way (...), because the youth in Cuba is not a yawn or a resignation but all those high dreams beginning with fire. Being young in Cuba means looking for the blue color of the day, living beauty intensely, contemplating the world from the flesh and the soul, from those things boiling in the body, then turning to animalism of art. Painting will be convulsive, or it won't be, retouching a sentence by Andre Breton. There is a hurricane and a tornado, there is an immense rain (...), something making our eyes new, putting a blue, different emotion in these eyes of ours, already too European and abstract. Seeing these paintings is seeing Cuba from a sob, from panic or happiness. Starting from figurativeness (Cuba is in no mood for abstractions), we find three different styles, three new (or maybe not so new), different ways of understanding that whole mental and marine field of the island (...) Luis Abreux comes from an insular, particular surrealism wanting to revive the world from color and amazing imagination. While the world cooks in the party and in the happiness of things (there's nothing more cheerful and surreal than a sow dancing in red knickers), the sadness of the days and the transcended reality anchor behind the yellows in Luis Abreux's canvases. I have seen the most absolute humility (...) To begin the year painting is a way of drinking the night and the country in slow sips. I'm already saying that painting, in Cuba, is an outlook on life, a scream of despair or the birth of days and winters. Painting is surviving, as the demons are walking down the streets, riding on horseback and with a bottle of rum in hand. -Emilio Arnao Exhibition THREE WINDOWS FROM HAVANA SAQUARTERA Art Center Palma de Mallorca, Spain January-February 1997
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Austin Area Interreligious Ministries Hosting Luis Abreux : One step in the door of the agency's Eastside location, and all eyes become riveted to Luis Abreux's vibrant, fantastical work. Vivid colors reminiscent of the painter's native Cuba and the dynamism of the topics command attention; it's as if his subjects were run through a Chuck Jones-meets-Picasso daydream. You may be tempted to stay and gaze for hours or wish you could take them all home. The local nonprofit gave the honor of their first foray into the art world to Abreux, whose recent situation qualified him for their services, allowing him to participate in his own assistance. Austin Chronicle Best of 2007-Surprise We Have an Art Show Here!
By Mayra Sorondo
Luis Abreux – Brightest Dreams
September 7th to October 20 2011
At Talento Bilingüe de Houston
As a clear example of the delicious Latin American diversity that characterizes Houston, Talento Bilingüe begins its new season hand-in-hand with Cuban artist Luis Abreux.
In the exhibit, titled Brightest Dreams, the artist promenades us through ten oil and acrylic canvases brimming with vivid colors conveying an evocative Caribbean look.
In response to the partial or total disappointment and the dilemma of existentialism that affects so many today, Abreux poses the question of social and economic troubles and the current Cuban inequality through surrealist and magical realism techniques.
The Cuban artistic movement of the 90‟s -Abreux‟s generation- was characterized by the representation of a hard-bitten and wry reality; a time to paint everyday garb and deception. A recurring character in Abreux‟s work is the harlequin, a classic Commedia dell’Arte symbol of servitude and poverty.
On a historical note, his painting „59‟ refers to a transition, the overthrown Batista dictatorship, making the year of the “Revolution” driven by a discourse of progress, anti-imperialistic and democratic change. “Victory and Justice” was everybody‟s dream and slogan.
In “Bike and Ron”, it is clear that “Ron” (Spanish for „rum‟) is causing the „blindness that allows the rider to escape from his surrounding reality. On the other hand, it leads us to infer that both, tobacco and rum –elements also present in his piece “Smoking”- are part of Cuba‟s national identity.
The theme of inequality is reflected in “Rich in Havana”. In this work, we can see characters that either move by themselves or are carried by others, as shown in “Taxi”; in contrast, we also see that the large majority of the population travels crowded from one side to another by means of “Crazy Cars”. “All Green” represents pollution, the damage cause to the environment and all living creatures on planet earth. Green may also stand for the army‟s uniform, the color of the oppressors still defending the policies of a regime that, as Silvio Rodriguez said, „should re-evolve to survive‟ (a play of words with the Spanish words for „revolutionize‟ and „re-evolve, as on evolving or transforming again).
Humans, in response to hardship, might try to hide behind mask and apparel. In “Truth”, we can see how the heavy burden of disguising who we are can lead to collapse and blindness.
In his work “Hope” the artist presents a state of mind achieved through illusion; a new transition to an unknown, but much needed change that would always be somehow „better‟. Through the use of wings, sails, propellers, wheels and ropes attached to their bodies and objects, the artist permits its characters the possibility of reaching that idealized, dreamt place.
Luis Abreux allows us all to take flight, to take a hold an imaginary reality that lets us enjoy the opportunities and abundance that only a few can relish
............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Abreux's talent was so prodigal that the state enabled him to receive a Master's in Fine Art from the most prestigious academy in Cuba the revered San Alejandro Academy in Havana specializing in painting and subliminal techniques. San Alejandro is an incubator for Cuba's most famous artists, like Tomas Sanchez and Wifredo Lam. He has had numerous one man shows including the 1997 Havana Biennial and is a member of the Asociacion Hermanos Saiz and ACEA Asociacion Catalana de Entidades Artisticas. His art is so fascinating due to its enormous range, diversity and sophistication. Some works are exquisitely esoteric while others have a naive feel. All of it is fresh and most arresting. He is working within dynamic social forces and this is dramatically evident. They capture infinitesimally thin slices of life exquisitely, and rather modestly. Overall the works are personal history paintings and all exhibit life affirming theatricality. After decades of near anonymity, contemporary Cuban artists are asserting their presence -- and winning acclaim like the coveted "Miro" in Spain. Likewise, important auction houses like Sotheby's are offering and receiving Picasso's contemporary, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam for over $1.2million. Museums and galleries in Paris, New York and Tokyo are also showing interest at an all-time high, contemporary Cuban art is finally being given its due and younger artists are coming to the forefront. Like Cuba's own popular music; salsa, mambo, cha, cha, cha etc., Cuban art is receiving serious attention. Abreux's work forms a magnificent spiritual tour de force for the twenty-first century. Nance Frank (Gallery on Greene) Key West, Florida
.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Abreux paints while the end of the world is coming over.
No other sentence would summarize in any more accurate way the contradictory spirit of this end and beginning of a century than a popular Cuban expression which invites: "Enjoy how you can, as the end of the world's coming over". In an evident paradox, the apocalyptic and the self-affirmative things, life and death, Eros and Thanatos are cooked together, seasoned in a sort of some sarcastic, hedonist insolence. And only a few looks, in the universe of Cuban plastic arts, have been able to capture such a spirit so deeply, and to undress it in their canvases and cardboards as the genius of Luis Abreux has done. A statement like this would seem disproportionate on presenting the work of a young painter, all the more when one is living a moment of true flowering of visual arts in the Island, where talent germinates everywhere and extends its branches and roots beyond our frontiers. And even, to make still more questionable the asseveration, the proposals of the last two decades that have been included under the capricious label of "New Cuban Art", amid an enormous thematic and stylistic diversity, have been, without a doubt, characterized by the intention to carry out a sociological investigation of the reality and to penetrate into the essential motivations of individual and social behaviors. Where does Luis Abreux's peculiarity have its roots, then? Abreux (Havana, 1971) graduated at San Alejandro Academy of Art in Havana as a substantial part of the artists contributing to the abovementioned boom of the Cuban plastic arts and its recognition; to this artistic education he adds his experience at a Workshop on Subliminal Techniques in Art and Publicity, which possibly has contributed to the level of suggestion and subtexts that characterizes his works. The key to this question lies not only here, however, but in the discoveries of his personal search, in his own selection of the means and codes he uses for his artistic expression, and in the sagacity and lucidity assisting him when answering private questions on his role as an artist, as a human being and therefore as a main character of an experience that is intimate but also interhuman and is inserted in the social medium and in a certain reality. By resorting to a kind of a melange (the deliberate Gallicism here does not respond to an intention to sweeten, but to an intention of dignifying a proposal which, expressed in Castilian, could carry in itself the somewhat depreciated term "jumble") where he merges with perfect coherence diverse resources coming from the fields of caricature, humorous vignette, comics or children's books illustration, Abreux gives account of that spirit of the time, which some prefer to call "post-modern condition", through a stylistic mannerism whose parodic, critic intention saves it from frivolity. Unquestionably estranged from certain so-called manias of the most contemporary art, such as that denominated "the return of the aesthetic paradigm of art", and without any intention of making deconstructive juggling with tradition, or of resorting to the nouvelle vague of hyperrealism, but using other codes also typical of him, such as a fondness for pastiche and kitsch touch, and by means of a kind of a new surrealism (and I use this term because no other one comes to my mind to name such imaginative overflow), tropical and colorist, playful and aggressive; Luis Abreux configures a very particular plastic substance whose inspiration source we should not look for in any "telluric current" or in "unconscious archetypes", much less in the sublimations of imagination or in the concealing artifice of the dreams. Rather we should search for that among the daily types, the common man passing by our side by the streets who, submerged in the often invisible traps of existence, is engaged in a quarrel between the defense of his dignity and the incidental pressures of survival. The characters parading through his pieces -in that such personal retable of the world he has constructed- are grotesque, but at the same time they are close and intimate (a paradox present in every artist whose vision, even if critic, of the human condition, is marked in its ultimate essence by Understanding); they exhibit such lightness and hedonism, such desublimated and even perverse eroticism, such obscene materialism, such deceitfulness and pretended dissimulation, and even sometimes such underground anguish and pain seemingly hiding their irony, jeer, lightness, worldliness and their reluctance to face the transcendency and the utopian ideals of current times. The anatomical distortion, the deformity of the figures or the animal anthropomorphism, the hysteroid overperformance of the expressions, the predilection for party and show, the shamelessness in the attitudes, the effrontery that doesn't avoid ridicule, are visual constants of a production that has also generated -perhaps as an alternative- different characters with a certain romantic impression, inclined toward the manifestation of kindness, spirituality and love to the other, where the form chosen by the author to capture them stands away from the exaggeration that characterizes caricature, also from excessive, bizarre tonalities, and assumes a more idealized figuration by using less aggressive, attenuated, sweetish color that brings it nearer to the ingenuousness of the infantile look. But the ones and the others form a unit marked by the harmony and the internal consistency of a perfectly recognizable proposal, and even more: both sides supplement one to another and meet further away in a deep look, exempt of any diatribe or any devastating or unappealable judgment, reaching the wisdom of recognizing that we all, absolutely, share a common condition. -Rafael Grillo CUBAHORA Electronic Review (Internet) Luis Abreux, City of Havana, 1971.
...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
The painter himself admits he cannot get rid of figuration; he admits that he feels the absolute necessity to refer to the human figure and he even seeks to make us believe that it is all about human figures. In fact, these zoomorphic, phitomorphic, even amorphous, even more, "anythingmorphic" figures are by no means anthropomorphic. They result from the conjugation of unreal anatomical forms with caricatures of different states of mind and the sensation of the absurdity of the characters. The drama of the intimate, the daily life is demythicized, man is alienated from his true atmosphere and placed in the "kermesse", the fair of his feelings, of his dreams, of his most illogical ideas. Yesterday he could have seen, or have believed to see that the hole on the wall was speaking and that a cooked potato was responding to it, but he rejected the idea because it seemed unlikely to him. When he arrived at the fair he found them commenting about the incredulous attitude the artist had had the previous day while serving him a pair of looking glasses on a tray. This is possible thanks to mock and parody; thanks to the capacity of exteriorizing that jester's quota we all have inside, and which we hide in compliance with old taboos. Caricature, deformity, collages of unexpected attitudes help to assimilate this world of comics and cartoon stories. He is also helped by the gracility of the line, the tactile value of the painting, the coloristic atmosphere. The exterior of the objects and the sensoriality of the forms are nothing but a pretext, a lure that we believe will make us laugh after making us swallow the bait and depict the mental attitudes of the characters; thereby demonstrating that life is, for many, the result of exaggeration of pain and exacerbation of permitted self-compassion. -Silvia Llanes Torres, Exhibition HAVANAN YOUNG PAINTING Dramatic Society of Maracaibo, Venezuela, August 1997.
.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
This (collective) exhibition tries to rehabilitate a type of painting to which we are not very accustomed, a painting coming to us from beyond the ocean, a new form of emotion and perception of things. (...) Luis Abreux (...) brings us a mental universe not very well-known so far, it is the mental universe of his land, Cuba, an island where painting is not a luxury but a thing that emerges from under the stones, among the trees and above the roofs of Havana. Cuban painting is an outlook on life, perhaps a response to life, in any event, a scream in the face of the world. We see it this way (...), because the youth in Cuba is not a yawn or a resignation but all those high dreams beginning with fire. Being young in Cuba means looking for the blue color of the day, living beauty intensely, contemplating the world from the flesh and the soul, from those things boiling in the body, then turning to animalism of art. Painting will be convulsive, or it won't be, retouching a sentence by Andre Breton. There is a hurricane and a tornado, there is an immense rain (...), something making our eyes new, putting a blue, different emotion in these eyes of ours, already too European and abstract. Seeing these paintings is seeing Cuba from a sob, from panic or happiness. Starting from figurativeness (Cuba is in no mood for abstractions), we find three different styles, three new (or maybe not so new), different ways of understanding that whole mental and marine field of the island (...) Luis Abreux comes from an insular, particular surrealism wanting to revive the world from color and amazing imagination. While the world cooks in the party and in the happiness of things (there's nothing more cheerful and surreal than a sow dancing in red knickers), the sadness of the days and the transcended reality anchor behind the yellows in Luis Abreux's canvases. I have seen the most absolute humility (...) To begin the year painting is a way of drinking the night and the country in slow sips. I'm already saying that painting, in Cuba, is an outlook on life, a scream of despair or the birth of days and winters. Painting is surviving, as the demons are walking down the streets, riding on horseback and with a bottle of rum in hand. -Emilio Arnao Exhibition THREE WINDOWS FROM HAVANA SAQUARTERA Art Center Palma de Mallorca, Spain January-February 1997
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Austin Area Interreligious Ministries Hosting Luis Abreux : One step in the door of the agency's Eastside location, and all eyes become riveted to Luis Abreux's vibrant, fantastical work. Vivid colors reminiscent of the painter's native Cuba and the dynamism of the topics command attention; it's as if his subjects were run through a Chuck Jones-meets-Picasso daydream. You may be tempted to stay and gaze for hours or wish you could take them all home. The local nonprofit gave the honor of their first foray into the art world to Abreux, whose recent situation qualified him for their services, allowing him to participate in his own assistance. Austin Chronicle Best of 2007-Surprise We Have an Art Show Here!