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Through a call from Villejuif, from Serge Fauchereau, who was the one who introduced him to me about ten years ago, I learned the sad news of the death of Joaquín Ferrer. The call revives my memory of my two visits to his crowded studio-home on the Boulevard Brune, near the Porte de Vanves, where, among his paintings, his etchings, his beloved fetishes, and his Japanese prints, and in the presence of Christiana I remember him, half in French, half in his tasty Cuban Spanish, telling me about his journey.
A native of Manzanillo, Ferrer, after working at the Railway Company, was about to study for a pilot. However, in 1952 he moved his residence to Havana, beginning his apprenticeship in art at the San Alejandro Academy, where he met the sculptor Agustín Cárdenas, a future fellow exile.
In 1958 he participated in a group show at the Habana Arte Cinema Gallery, with a catalog prefaced by Severo Sarduy, whom he frequented, as well as Lezama. Three years earlier, he had held his first individual there. He presented others at the Lyceum (1956), Color Luz (1957), and the MAM (1958). In his work from that time he plans the tutelary shadow of Wifredo Lam, whom he frequented.
In 1959 Ferrer settled in Paris with a scholarship, at the Casa de Cuba of the Cité Universitaire. The following year, like his first wife, Gina Pellón, or his close friend Jorge Camacho, he appeared in a group of artists from the island curated by Roberto Altmann for the Galerie du Dragon. He would never return to his country. Opposed to the Castro dictatorship, we find his signature at the bottom of several manifestos demanding the return of democracy. Close to surrealism and ‘Phases’, although reluctant to any militancy, he coincided with Max Ernst, Michaux or Sima at Le Point Cardinal, Jean Hughes’ marvelous gallery. In 1968, his first solo show featured a catalog with a prologue by Alain Bosquet, plus a collage by Ernst. In 1974, the second was presented by Claude Esteban, who would make him collaborate on ‘Argile’. Hughes had a bibliophile book project on the painter with Octavio Paz, which unfortunately did not come out. Ferrer’s paintings from those years are light, luminous. Labyrinths based on drawing and geometry. Exhibitor then with Albert Loeb, Les Yeux Fertiles or Anthony Meyer, in 2001 Lionel Ray dedicated a great monograph to him, which sees his paintings as cities, forests, libraries… Silent, essential work. Go back and forth between abstraction and figuration. Faces, women, vases, birds, butterflies, spiders, trees, and above all blue, reddish, yellow landscapes, with changing lights, with a predilection for dawn and dusk. In 2017, precisely Fauchereau, who speaks to his purpose of Piranesi, Monsu Desiderio or the Facteur Cheval, curated his great retrospective of the Maison de l’Amérique Latine.
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