Rogelio Puente

ROGELIO PUENTE (Cuba, 1936-1996).
"Interior".
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 81 x 54 cm; 97 x 70 cm (frame).
Domestic scene of aristocratic character, set in a nineteenth-century environment. The composition is organized in an elegant living room of walls upholstered in red, richly decorated with numerous oil portraits framed in gold, which evoke a family lineage or a gallery of ancestors. In the foreground is a finely carved dark wood desk, on which rest decorative and utilitarian objects such as candlesticks, clocks and a writing desk, reflecting refined taste and bourgeois order. To the right, a chair with a carved back complements the atmosphere of seclusion and contemplation. The parquet floor and green velvet curtains reinforce the sense of restrained luxury and formal balance.
Rogelio Puente Díaz de la Rocha was born in Havana to a wealthy Spanish family living in Cuba. His impeccable academic training took place in the Caribbean country, Canada and the United States. At the age of fourteen he moved definitively to Spain with his family, settling in La Coruña, where he continued his studies. He studied law in Santiago de Compostela and later completed his studies in England. He then moved to Madrid and it was there, delighting in the masterpieces discovered by the Prado Museum, when his artistic interests were strengthened and he began to reflect seriously on the plastic solutions required by his pictorial proposals. He travels to Italy and France in search of new artistic references, both classical and contemporary. He studied the first two years of Architecture and later four years of Decorative Arts. In 1976 he began a successful career of exhibitions and artistic prizes that began with his participation in the Biennial of Pontevedra, held that same year. He collaborates in the National Painting Exhibition in Bilbao and in the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. He exhibits in several galleries in Galicia and in different American countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Dominican Republic or Argentina, as well as in France and New York. Rogelio Puente is an evoker of atmospheres and a magnificent portraitist. With a serene and solid personality, he faithfully and with dignity maintained a realistic line, even though he understood that he was living in the era of the awakening of Galician painting to formal innovations and to a more conceptual and committed art.