Jerry Cabrera
Paintings
SOLD
SOLD
Artist Statement
Light
At the concentration camp site and at the Jewish Museum in Germany I began to consider the importance of light in isolated environments, environments of extreme suffering and environments that are considered sacred, such as a church or cathedral.
With light comes color, and color denotes life. Light is also associated with knowledge, hope, warmth and energy. In architecture light is used as an element of design; and if you consider how the architecture of the prison cells limited the amount of light that made its way in, that light becomes more precious to the person in the cell or in solitary confinement. Psychologically, this may have been the only element of hope present in that type of environment. Light is extremely important because it becomes the only source of visual escape from imprisonment and isolation. When you look outward, for an instance you are not visually aware of your immediate surroundings, and in that instance there is a visual escape that takes place. When people gaze into a sunset they are experiencing that escape simultaneously with the visuals of color spectra created by light. We are free to experience the vastness of light every day when we walk outside into the sun. This body of work was influenced by those who were not, and are not free.
My intention with these paintings is to give the viewer a narrow but vast window of light.
Narrow enough not to physically fit through, but vast enough through which to visually escape.
Jerry Cabrera
Biorgraphy of the Artist
Jerry Cabrera was born in Laredo, Texas in 1977 . After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Texas State University in 2001,
Cabrera received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2004. Recent exhibitions featuring his work
include the 9th Annual Young Latino Artists Exhibition in Austin, Texas (2004) and the Red Dot Auction at Blue Star Arts Complex (2005 and 2006).
His solo exhibititions have been at the UTSA Satellite Space (2005) and at Sound Contemporary Art Space in Laredo, Texas (2005).
His work is on exhibition at the Joan Grona Gallery where he is one of the gallery's artists.
Cabrera is in the collection of Neiman-Marcus Collections of San Antonio, Texas and Baca Raton, Florida. He is also in the AT&T collection in San Antonio, Texas/
Jerry Cabrera
Reverse Pass
5000.00
Jerry Cabrera
Spiinning Cape
5000.00
Painting is one of the oldest and still powerful forms of communication in Western culture. For 30,000 years, artists have relied upon two basic forms of pictorial expression: representation, which produces identifiable images comparable to things in the real world, and abstraction, which relies on marks and shapes as well as color, space, pattern, and scale to convey the endurance, transcendence, or flux of life itself. Simultaneously speaking the languages of representation and abstraction, San Antonio painter Jerry Cabrera investigates the choreography and masquerade associated with the bullfight, a Spanish and Latin American tradition inherited from ancient Rome. Like Francisco de Goya, Edouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso before him, Cabrera is drawn to the life-and-death ritual of the bullfight as a spectacular drama. In Cabrera's paintings, however, the chauvinistic heroism associated with the bullfight is usurped by a cinematic obsession with rich color and graceful motion. By refusing to picture the protagonists--the matador and bull--while retaining the illusionistic space of the bullring and highly detailed, billowing three-dimensionality of the cape, Cabrera deals with abstract issues in the guise of representation.
The realistically painted mise-en-scène --the scene-setting background--includes the bullring's red fence and low white railing (allowing the bullfighter to quickly surmount the fence) as well as the sandy ground of the arena. The warm golden sunshine of an afternoon accentuates the shadows beneath and in the folds of the ghostly cape as well as the railing, contributing to the believability of the scene. Legible in varying degrees from painting to painting, the space occupied by the now-missing bullfighter is, in contrast, flat and without substance; our attention shifts to the frozen gestures and gallant arabesques. The subject of the paintings is the action of the cape. Stressing activity over imagery, Cabrera calls them "Verb Paintings."
Based on photographs of actual bullfights, the scenes are drawn from the first stage of the Spanish corrida when the formal gold and magenta cape is used to gauge the bull's aggressiveness. Like the paintings overall, the duality of representation and abstraction is echoed in the figure of the cape. In contrast to the real cape draped over a handbuilt abstract support recalling the red wall and white railing, in the paintings the cape is only variously colored, glazed, and blended brushstrokes. With chromatic warmth and compositional verve, the inert subject of the sculpture is transformed into a dynamic force by the sensitive touch and skillful brush of the artist.
Frances Colpitt
June 2007
Biorgraphy of the Artist
Jerry Cabrera was born in Laredo, Texas in 1977 . After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Texas State University in 2001,
Cabrera received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2004. Recent exhibitions featuring his work
include the 9th Annual Young Latino Artists Exhibition in Austin, Texas (2004) and the Red Dot Auction at Blue Star Arts Complex (2005 and 2006).
His solo exhibititions have been at the UTSA Satellite Space (2005) and at Sound Contemporary Art Space in Laredo, Texas (2005).
His work is on exhibition at the Joan Grona Gallery where he is one of the gallery's artists.
Cabrera is in the collection of Neiman-Marcus Collections of San Antonio, Texas and Baca Raton, Florida. He is also in the AT&T collection in San Antonio, Texas/