Julio Larraz: Venice

Bulls and sharks, lions and beasts are metaphors for a cynical and unstoppable power in Romantic culture, but in the paintings of Julio Larraz, a Cuban painter now exhibiting at the Contini Gallery in Venice, they rise as symbols denouncing man's overpowering power over man. These two-dimensional images, with a strong caricature and surrealist accent, show the fragile side and inconsistency of authority. The lightness of the "ridicule" the enlightened French would say: sarcasm and irony are the means by which Larraz combats abuses and excesses of power. Brightly toned images where the subjects depicted appear off-center from the viewer, who is invited to look beyond and smile critically, along with the painter, at the powerful. Free from political schemes and ideologies, Julio Larraz points at a subject and armed with a paintbrush sketches it in a parodistic, sometimes grotesque way, revealing its vices and frailties.