CUBAN LANDSCAPES

Just as the pointillist painters did, Toledo decides to present color as the simplest unit that composes the image. By using an openwork template to apply the color, he makes the pigment not only appear as that primary module, but it also acquires volume and becomes texture on the canvas, organizing itself in a pattern. The color interaction thus becomes more complex: between each of the small areas that stand out and the framework that they make up with the color of the background. In this way, the Cuban landscape seems to be trapped under a network of volumes, hues, and lights and shadows.

SOY CUBA series, 2019

Landing (Aterrizando)

Acrylic on canvas, 78 ¾ x 118 in (200 x 300 cm), comprised by six panels of 39 ⅜ x 39 ⅜ in (100 x 100 cm), 2018

This is the first piece from the Soy Cuba series, a cloudscape based on a photo taken from a plane descending over the province of Havana. Approximate altitude of 5500 feet.

Guidance

Steps in the process

A detail

Sunrise at Pico Turquino (Amanecer en el Pico Turquino)

Acrylic on canvas, 78 ¾ x 118 in (200 x 300 cm), comprised by six panels of 39 ⅜ x 39 ⅜ in (100 x 100 cm), 2018

This is a view of the Sierra Maestra during a trip with friends to the Eastern part of Cuba during the summer of 2013. The image was taken very early in the morning before reaching the top of Turquino Peak, the country’s highest point with 6476 feet.

AMANECER-EN-EL-PICO-TURQUINO-COLORES-BAS

Guidance-Sketch

Main colors

A detail

Zapata Swamp (Ciénaga de Zapata)

Acrylic on canvas, 78 ¾ x 118 in (200 x 300 cm), comprised by six panels of 39 ⅜ x 39 ⅜ in (100 x 100 cm), 2019

The Ciénaga de Zapata is the largest wetland in Cuba and the Caribbean, located in the province of Matanzas. Its landscape reaches a maximum of 32 feet above the sea level. This is how it looks from the road that leads to the town of Playa Girón.

Guidance-Sketch

Color pencils - Mixed colors

Color map

"Over the course of his nascent career, Toledo has explored the manifold properties and applications of color through a wide array of abstract practices. Imbued with this chromatic and abstract sensibility, the landscapes of Soy Cuba represent a fusion of the abstract and the pictorial, the formal and the organic, and the rational and sensuous. In these paintings, Toledo employs a recently developed technique that allows him to build up a painted relief pattern across the canvas, resulting in a geometric, surface texture that profoundly complicates the mixing and application of colors to the relief and the background, respectively. By applying a single, uniform color to each element of the relief pattern, he preserves the integrity of these discrete units, thereby producing the larger image through a vast network of color relations."

Read Color Vision in the Landscapes of Roger Toledo by Francesca Bolfo.

At Dusk (Al Anochecer)

Acrylic on canvas, 78 ¾ x 118 in (200 x 300 cm), comprised by six panels of 39 ⅜ x 39 ⅜ in (100 x 100 cm), 2018

The sun goes down and I´m facing North. This is in Varadero, on the Hicacos peninsula, the northernmost point of the Cuban geography.

Guidance-Sketch

Sky´s main colors

A detail

Towards Veril´s Edge (Hacia el Canto del Veril)

Acrylic on canvas, 78 ¾ x 118 in (200 x 300 cm), comprised by six panels of 39 ⅜ x 39 ⅜ in (100 x 100 cm), 2019

Canto del Veril is the first large marine platform that surrounds Cuba. This photo was taken while diving at 85 feet deep on the northern coast of Havana, close to this edge that can be found after 90 feet deep.

Guidance-Sketch

Metal template

A detail

“Rising over the Sierra Maestra mountains, looming over the Zapata swamp, and setting over a North Shore marina, the sun acts as a marker of the time of the day in three of the five paintings that comprise Toledo’s Soy Cuba series. In these paintings, three distinct historical moments—the Revolution of 1959, the 1961 Batalla de Girón, and the Special Period of the 1990s—are made to synchronize with uneasiness during the timespan of a day. Although the sequential nature of the paintings that comprise Toledo’s paintings may seem to evoke a conception of time and history as a chronological succession of distinct moments, I suggest that the series alternatively presents a type of non-teleological change that can only be perceived through the small incremental contingencies of the everyday.”

Read Island Time: Temporality and History in Roger Toledo’s Soy Cuba Series by Isabelle Lynch.