Richard Somonte Llerena

Pinar del Río, Cuba, 1991

I graduated in 2010 from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. My thesis was the result of a research process focused on the landscape genre in the eighteenth century, particularly the Hudson River School and English Romanticism. I was interested in their influence on the representation of landscape painting in Cuban art. Artists such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Moran, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner were among the principal figures I studied.

I have always been interested in the artistic production associated with what we know as Romanticism. After studying the representation of mountains, I began to focus on the figurative work of the major masters of the period, including Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, and Francisco Goya.

Understanding the history of painting as a succession of Pragmatist and Idealist cycles, Romanticism could be considered the last great Idealist cycle, followed by a pragmatic period extending from Realism to Impressionism, which in turn was succeeded by another idealist phase that clearly extends from Post-Impressionism to Contemporary painting, with certain exceptions.

After my definitive move to Spain, I began studying the Spanish School, and particularly the close relationship between Spanish popular traditions and Cuban history and identity.