The renowned Cuban visual artist Moisés Finalé invites us to an attractive personal exhibition entitled Entre Senufo y Meninas, which opened on Friday 21 May, on the Instagram profile of Galería Habana (@galeria_habana), part of Génesis Galerías.

The exhibition brings together a group of works conceived and produced by the artist from his studio in Havana and is, from a thematic-curatorial point of view, “a substantial argument and symbiosis between the world of the Meninas of the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez and the Senufo culture.”

As a special feature, the gallery will make available to the public, through its social media, an interactive 360° tour with real images of the exhibition in the physical space in which it is exhibited, but due to the epidemiological crisis generated by COVID-19 it is not possible to enjoy it in person.

The pieces exhibited in Entre Senufo y Meninas are based on the perennial restlessness - that has marked the artist for years - of the sculptural images of dissimilar African tribes and ethnic groups, and this is linked to the Meninas, a masterpiece by Diego Velázquez.

These works by Moisés Finalé are the protagonists of an argument between universes apparently opposed in conceptual and geographical terms.

The initial idea, as the creator has confessed, arose during his stay in France and his gaze towards Africa from the old continent, thus initiating a cycle of exhibitions that began in Paris and then moved to Galería Habana with the title “Problemas de identidad” in 2011.

In the words of the catalogue of that first exhibition, the renowned art critic, Yolanda Wood, underlined: “There are disjunctive letters, which unite and separate to give meaning to what one wants to express. The disjunctions seem to offer elective variants that can be summed up as: 'this or that', 'take it or leave it', no more. They seem to figure alternations between apparent equivalences of meanings, and so they are not always either so alternative or so equivalent. A disjunction always leaves the way open to tropological ambiguity tending towards disparate similarity.”

On this occasion, Between Senufo and Meninas juxtaposes a reference as close as Velázquez, who formally conceptualizes the series, with the Senufo culture, which recreates a whole symbolic and material universe through African faces, achieving in each piece the symbiosis between both worlds and their positioning before the spectator's gaze, based on the artist's personal precepts when conceiving the work in a trans-avant-garde spirit.

This exhibition commemorates the 40th anniversary of Moisés Finalé's first solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, since the curator Tomás Brene, in charge of the Pequeño Salón space, dedicated in this institution to young creators, invited Finalé to exhibit in August 1981, making those “Paintings and Drawings” the artist's first solo exhibition.

The outstanding contemporary Cuban painter Moisés Finalé (Cárdenas, 1957) is considered one of the most representative figures of the visual arts in the 1980s.

His references are diverse, as the acclaimed artist draws from diverse sources such as Japanese and Egyptian culture, the Fauvism movement, expressionism and the Cuban avant-garde. African symbology has also been cardinal in his visual work.

In 1983, Finalé founded the group 4x4 together with three other creators; he also stands out for his extensive and fruitful professional career with innumerable personal and collective exhibitions in the most famous galleries in Cuba and the world.

His latest solo exhibitions include: Los silencios no existen, Galería Artis 718, Havana or La virgen de la fábrica, Fábrica de Arte Cubano (FAC), Havana.