When Cuban-born artist Carlos Gamez de Francisco was a young student, he, like many budding artists, copied masterworks of other painters. He began with Monet. But a prescient teacher told Gamez de Francisco that copying Impressionists was easy compared to works of Renaissance masters. This led to the artist’s fascination with 15^th– to 17^th-century portraits of aristocrats. It was a way to practice technique and composition that influences him to this day.

We likely have that teacher to thank for much of the work on display at Portland Art Gallery’s “Carlos Gamez de Francisco” (through July 30). The show reveals an artist skillfully working across various media, including photography, acrylic paint and watercolor. The densely hung show splits roughly into two sections: photography clustered in the streetside space of the gallery, paintings toward the back.

The photography – large-format Chromaluxe aluminum prints – is by far the most powerful work in the show, fascinating for its labor-intensiveness, formal beauty, saturation of tone and a resourcefulness that I, as a fellow Cuban, appreciate on a deeply personal level (more on this in a minute).

The photographic portraits are primarily of women between the ages of 16 and 24. Gamez de Francisco shot each in her home in Cuba, adopting the manner of Renaissance portraiture of painters such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Titian, Jan Van Eyck and others. This body of work resembles – at least superficially – that of contemporary Dutch photographer Hendrik Kerstens. But there is a big difference between the two, one that’s important for appreciating the complexity of Gamez de Francisco’s undertaking.

Kerstens’s portraits are beautiful, contemplative and enigmatic in their reductiveness. All feature his daughter Paula, his longtime muse, most often wearing headdresses made of plastic shopping or garbage bags. He is, like Gamez de Francisco, inspired by Renaissance portraiture, but limited to the Flemish 17^th-century variety. There is a rigor in this minimalism and the parameters he imposes upon his approach.

Gamez de Francisco’s works are also rigorous, though in a more intensely obsessive way. They concern themselves with the sumptuousness of many aristocratic and noble Renaissance portraits, which luxuriated in the textures of apparel – fur-trimmed capes, lace collars and cuffs, precious jewelry, silks and so on. Cuba, of course, is scant on such resources, not to mention art supplies in general. Gamez de Francisco himself has employed coffee, diesel fuel and toothpaste. To prop these portraits, then, he turned to quotidian objects and materials pulled directly from each of his subjects’ homes.

This sort of resourcefulness, in my view, is a very Cuban trait. Post-revolutionary Cuba has been, since the 1960s, a place of great deprivation, one worsened by the withdrawal of Soviet economic and trade support after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For over 60 years, making do with little has been a way of life that has led to a very characteristic resiliency. It is not, of course, quantitatively different from what happens in many poor countries.

But I have always experienced Cubans as also possessing a keen understanding of life’s inherent absurdity. Cubans joke about everything – partly as coping mechanism, but also as a component of our nature. It manifests in a persistent irony that affects our general orientation toward life and even inflects our language. A typical example: A bus with a dip in the middle of its roofline is referred to as “el camello,” or camel. We often call things by their opposite.

Gamez de Francisco’s compositions can take hours to create. And they are so successful in conveying their textural richness that we don’t at first even realize the common nature of their elements. “Flowers for Fasting,” for example, is a woman dressed head to toe in scarlet. She wears a beautiful jeweled choker, and the fabric of her attire appears to be silk. Yet Gamez de Francisco fashioned the headdress using a piece of cardboard wrapped in a red curtain. We are so entranced by the extravagance of the billowy drapery that it takes a second or two to notice that her “bouquet” is composed of a cluster of spiral LED bulbs.

“Flowers” strikes a pitch-perfect balance of aesthetic formalism, opulence, irreverence and cultural (possibly also political) commentary. The same goes for “Cup Cake in Heaven,” a portrait of a young woman in a costume that sports wide Flemish lace cuffs and collars a la Frans Hals or Rembrandt. But these are actually everyday paper doiles, and if you look closely, you will see the safety pin that affixes the collar to the dress. These elements bring the image – an illusion of wealth and splendor – down to earth.

“The Vision of Lorenzo,” a Black man wearing red and yellow robes, hands clasped in prayer, is one of few male portraits. But Gamez de Francisco’s direction of his model has produced an expression that perfectly tells the story of this Christian martyr. In 258, Emperor Valerian ordered the execution of bishops, priests and deacons. The prefect of Rome demanded Lorenzo turn over all the church’s treasures. Over the next few days, Lawrence distributed these riches to indigent people of the city. When the time came to relinquish them to the prefect, he instead brought along a crowd of poor people, presenting them as the church’s real riches.

Lorenzo was put to death for his offense. But the model stares at the viewer with a quiet, yet knowing, insouciant dignity. There is even a hint of a smile on his face. The fact of his skin color would have been a further affront to Roman authority. Again, a beautiful image that is at once scandalous and formidable, delivered with ironic wit that feels to me culturally inborn and endemic to the Cuban view of life.

The lushness and potency of the photos raises an unintended problem for the paintings. For one thing, Gamez de Francisco’s preferred palette for the latter is primarily one of pastel shades that are thinly applied, causing these to recede in comparison to the highly saturated color and bold composition of the photography. Which is a pity, because much of this body of work is quite interesting.

The most successful works here have a surreal kind of allure. The mask-wearing necessitated by the pandemic spawned a series of paintings that partially or completely obscure the faces of his female subjects. But in most, it is the bottom of the face that is exposed rather than the eyes (again an inversion of the reality at the root of the works). The strongest paintings do so by bedecking the upper half of these faces – sometimes the entire head – with elaborate arrangements of flowers.

In “Garden Party I,” a profusion of exuberant, oversized blossoms covers the subject’s eyes and rises an improbable three or four feet above the model’s head. Bees, wasps and a ladybug buzz about her or land on her breast. Everything means something in these works. Insects that plummet downward symbolize chaos. Their flight alludes to freedom. Stationary on a surface, they signify balance.

These headdresses allude to Marie Antoinette. Indeed, several of them, such as “Garden Party II” and “Spring Dress,” are accompanied by corseted bodices, Watteau pleats, lace trim and petticoated skirts. Clearly Gamez de Francisco is fascinated by historic costumes. Interestingly, however, he creates tension by having models wear sunglasses, which add a kind of sass and sex appeal that purely historic portraits lack.

The emphasis on costume, however, means that many of the paintings can come off as less interesting when the models exude too much of a contemporary brand of beauty. Gamez de Francisco’s painting style – its pastel softness, thin paint application and idealization of the female body, as well in the contemporary hair styles, attitudes and expressions of its models – can often appear more like fashion illustration than portrait painting.

I kept wondering what they would be like if they were more intensely hued and impastoed, if the models were a bit zaftig or less pretty. They might feel less objectified and instead emanate more bearing and depth.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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