Centenary of maestro Ramón Oviedo, emperor of iconography

Only an artist like Ramón Oviedo was able to approach these halls of artistic creation, taking a gigantic step in Latin American art.
As the writer Juan P. Ribas reveals: “The work of art, like every human work, is subject to the definitive judgment of the centuries.” He quotes the consecrated intellectual Paul de Saint Victor, who declares that “Great works have, like mountains, echoes that respond through the ages… Because the spirit of man is one and eternal.”

If we make a chronology of the work of art of the “Supreme Jupiter of the imagination”, as I have always called him, we necessarily have to admit that his purpose in art was to seek the supremacy of aesthetic quality and integrate man into a humanity whose shudders awaken the mysteries that it will never decipher or know.

Only an artist like Ramón Oviedo was able to approach these halls of artistic creation, taking a gigantic step in Latin American art.
Art is part of a dramaturgy, a morphological presence and a dimensionality of life that, according to the Spanish art historian José María Moreno Galván, represents a synthetic and genuine testimony.[1]

The work of the great master Ramón Oviedo, a transcendental symbol of Latin American art, a creator without borders, whose pictorial mark represents an ocean of arguments and disquisitions that speak for themselves of how he combines idea and execution when painting a painting or making a drawing.

Maestro Oviedo offers a very human portrait of his persistent social concerns. In that aspect, his life is well founded by the content he gave to art and his willingness to put it at the service of the community, based on a concern for human beings and society.

He always had plenty of reasons to paint the raw reality of the subjects, but also the inspiration to recreate illusions related to the raw material, translated into feelings, freedom and hope, elements that, in essence, reveal the truth and social commitments. above all things.

Other elements to take into account in his art are the areas of subversive, warlike forms, in their combat with matter, and the discourse that serves as correspondence with subjective reality. For his part, in the subtle and coherent composition, is where Maestro Oviedo achieves the illusion of art, turning it into supreme language.

His art is distinguished by its avant-garde accent and the syntax of his compositions that, in a general sense, formulates a metaphor of symbols and, at the same time, a counterpoint where the viewer is convinced that his pictorial creations are the result of a vigorous material and psychic expression, as it is transformed into poetic beauty and analytical invention.

Maestro Oviedo was a key and determining figure in the development of Latin American art, as confirmed by the famous critic José Gómez Sicre, who worked for the Organization of American States (OAS). This one, in his role as director of the cultural department and on a visit to the Dominican Republic and the Museum of Modern Art, when contemplating two works by the master Oviedo – which were hanging in the lobby of the institution – he was so amazed of the same ones that, upon his return to the United States, immediately suggested, to the then secretary of that organization, the commission of a mural by the Dominican master for the headquarters of the OAS.

Similarly, the ambassador in France requested the secretary general of UNESCO to create a mural that represented all races; proposal that was unanimously approved by the members of the Council of that organization that works for education, science and culture, with Maestro Oviedo congratulated by the ambassadors to the aforementioned organization for such a great fresco.

Also in the Supreme Court of Justice and in the Chamber of Deputies of the Republic, there are two murals that reveal the creative force of this consecrated master, who elevates the name of the country by exhibiting a self-portrait of him in the very important Uffizi Gallery. , in Florence (Italy).
There is no doubt that in the art of the master Oviedo, the material acquires the spirit of the unfathomable and a mythological function that is nothing more than a clash between reality and fiction and, in both cases, the surfaces of his paintings are part of a superior unity that impacts due to the force represented by its forms, symbols and images.

His works are characterized by their anthropological structure, by their marriage between individuality and the conjunction of symbols that, in their plastic elements, enrich the transcendent function of his art.

It should be noted that his art rests on four fundamental axes or styles: expressionism, impressionism, muralism and abstractionism, which served as a method or mechanism to subvert the material and frame it in a compositional architecture in which the viewer often gets lost in the contemplation of an archipelago of lines that run through the entire atmosphere of his paintings.