Ernesto Briel Luzardo, Guanabacoa, Havana, Cuba, 1943 – New York, USA, 1992 Painter, draftsman, set designer. He was a pioneer of Op Art in Cuba. The development of his body of work takes us back to the early 1960s. Briel’s maturation as an optical and kinetic artist parallels that of his Latin American counterparts in Paris. It was in his small studio in Guanabacoa, an idyllic colonial municipality of Havana, that he began to create assemblages and three-dimensional pieces that played with the feelings and proposals of kinetic movement; and, at times, he reviewed the essence and proposals of the historical Dadaist group. In 1978 he accepted an invitation to be part of a very short-lived artistic group: the Grupo Cubano de Arte Optico. In 1980, as part of the Cuban exodus, Ernesto Briel left Cuba along with his lifelong companion, fellow artist Jesús (Cepp) Selgas, and settled in the center of New York City. In the 1980s he brought with him a great change in the architecture of a new life as a man and as an artist. He begins by leaving Cuba behind and being reborn in the freedom of exile. It will be the only entire decade that he will live and work in New York, in the emblematic midtown New York. It is the decade in which he will be able to access and be nourished by the art that he has always been interested in and inspired, that is now in front of his eyes and not in his hands, in the form of printed material, and that will mark the future of he. creative decisions. It is a time to face art with the aim of discovering, deciphering, revaluing, taking advantage of and discarding. These are critical and turbulent times for Briel, who must make important personal and professional decisions. From this decade and the first two years of the next, most of Briel’s sketches in existence are dated. The 1980s will find Briel, the accomplished painter, making use of his academic training and introducing a more palette and texture. varied in their practice. In 1992, a lifelong dream of Briel’s came true: he was asked to join fellow Cuban teacher Carmen Herrera in the exhibition titled Dúo Geo. He could not attend the inauguration. He died of complications related to an illness a few weeks later. Ernesto Briel’s legacy is rooted in a deep passion and fidelity to geometric abstraction. The purist cartoonist of the 1960s and 1970s, a pioneer of Op Art in his native Cuba, came full circle. Towards the end of his life and career, he drew, sketched and painted with incredible strength and precision. He dared to give a flat pictorial surface a more painterly quality, enriching and adding more three-dimensionality to the picture planes. In his practice, Briel fused linear, minimalist and geometric elements with a complex and profound vision that reveals the flexibility and universality of the chosen theme. According to Samuel Feijóo, he was considered the “purest” painter of optical art in Cuba.

Education

1961-1964 “San Alejandro” National School of Visual Arts, Havana.
1976-1980 National School of Design, Havana.
1989 Photography. Parsons School of Design, New York.

Professional Activity

1961 Actor. National Guiñol Theater, Havana.
1966 Set and Costume Designer. National Guiñol Theater, Havana.
1978 Member. Cuban Opco Art Group, Havana