Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
Camagüey, May 16 – Thirty years of artistic life and twenty years leading the Isabel de las Mercedes group are not just figures to be celebrated: they are the steps of a patient vocation, the fruits of a fidelity that has continued to sow beauty on the margins of the everyday. Luis Manuel Torres Viamontes has forged his career like someone cultivating fertile soil: with hands stained with color, with an eye toward the small, and with the desire to make art a form of community.
From Cascorro, his hometown, to Vertientes, where he resides today, including his constant stays in the city—especially at the fairs in Maceo Square, where he is a beloved figure—his life journey has also been his raw material. His work is born from his surroundings, but it doesn't remain anecdotal: he transforms it into a scene, turns it into a visual chronicle, and returns it as a celebration of images that encompass memory, laughter, tenderness, and even the absurdity of Cuban rural life.
Luis Manuel considers himself a naive artist, not due to a lack of training—he is a graduate and instructor with extensive teaching experience—but rather by aesthetic choice. He chose the path that is sometimes misunderstood as "lesser" or "intuitive," but in his case, it was a deliberate act of fidelity to his surroundings, his culture, and his artistic truth.
He has understood naif art not as a lack, but as a possibility: a way of looking at the world without abandoning mischief, painting without fearing color, of telling without being bound by imposed canons. In his words and in his work, there is a vindication of the genuine, of the value that inhabits in what others might consider insignificant: an insect, a tree, a meal, a greeting between neighbors.
Works such as "La Mula Beach," "Chivichana Race," "Yoke of Oxen," "Cockfight," "The Flower Seller," "Journey in a Guarandinga," "Through the Rainbow," "The Serenade," "Sanjuaneando," and "Playing House" capture scenes that might seem minor, but which in his hands become symbols of a living, irreverent, and profoundly human culture. There is no empty space in his paintings because there is no empty space in life: every corner is populated with details, characters, and gestures that deserve to be told.
His leadership of the Isabel de las Mercedes group has been as sustained as his work. Since the founding of the sociocultural project in the 2000s, he has supported generations of popular creators, promoted the creation of the Provincial Naive Art Salon, and championed the need for permanent spaces where grassroots culture can be proudly expressed. His return to the Adelante newspaper gallery—a space that has served as a sub-venue for his initiatives—is also a return to that founding impulse: to paint, to gather, to share.
The exhibition Luis Manuel Torres Viamontes: 30 Years of Ingenuity and Mischief, presented today, brings together 15 works that condense decades of attentive observation. It opens with "Dawn in the Village," a title that seems to summarize his own journey: a life that dawns every day in front of the canvas, with the same passion as always, with the same faith that art—naive, yes, but also wise—can continue to illuminate the stories of the people that inspire it. (Yanetsy León González/Adelante Digital) (Photo: Alejandro Bonet Piñón/Adelante Digital)
