Art and History at the Banco popular dominicano visual arts collection
Ox,» oil/canvas, 60x90 cm., no date 60x75 cm., no date v «Seascape and vessel,» oil/canvas, 60x45 cm., no date v «Carriage and Ox,» oil/canvas, 70x118 cm., no date v «Washers,» oil/canvas, 60x75 cm., no date v «San Rafael Beach, Barahona,» oil/canvas, 60x90 cm., no date v «Seascape with Sailboat,» oil/canvas, 55x75 cm., no date v «Ox, Carriages and Canes,» oil/canvas, 54x88 cm., no date. «Country Little House,» acrylic/canvas, 54x75 cm., no date v «Seascape,» acrylic/canvas, 75x100 cm., no date. no date
v «Carriage
v «Caravel,»
and
oil/canvas,
Prats-Ventós: SCULPTURES AND PAINTINGS With an artistic reputation as professor as well as an sculptor, Antonio Prats-Ventós played a significant role during the 1966-1970 period. Exhibitor on the rise, he had an individual showing at the Universidad Madre y Maestra campus’ opening (1966). Other individuals from that period: Universidad de Santiago (1964); in Puerto Rico, at the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and the Museo Universitario de Río Piedras (1968). By that time, the cultural group La Máscara had elected him as the Year’s Sculptor (1966), taking into consideration his personal exhibition at the Fine Arts Palace, where he showed 81 sculptures. He was a professor at the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s (UNPHU) Architecture School and at the same time, teaching at the Fine Arts National School when, in 1969, when two expressive statues he had created for the Fine Arts Palace front were downed. The Palace, opened in 1956, was transformed into the national collection venue that included his awarded works from different Biennials; hosting at the same time the school in which he was a sculptor professor. The shameful event provoked his resignation, producing at once a sculptural group forged in iron entitled «Angels Procession for a Death Statue,» group of 100 abstract pieces plus one figurative shown at UNPHU in 1969. Darío Suro, in his monograph «Arte Dominicano,» (1968, p.72), said: «Prats-Ventós created and matured his work in the Dominican Republic. In Prats-Ventós remains the
flavour of someone influenced by the environmental features, especially for the material offered by it: He has worked splendidly the Dominican stones: Samana’s onyx, pink marble, granite, alabaster; and the woods like Guayacan wood, mahogany and teak. His pieces made in stone present a formal strength and an expressive sureness only seen in the contemporary sculpture’s real masters: Brancusi, Moore and Arp. The technic hasn’t have secrets for this young sculptor (…) Prats-Ventós has been present in all the Biennials held in Dominican Republic (…) He is represented in many public buildings and private residences.» A sculptor of bulk and relief pieces, he stands out also as orator for the symbolic or referenced abstraction. A discreet painter as well, with differentiated styles and themes. According to María Ugarte (Prats-Ventós 19251999, page 195), in 1970 he starts the series «Las Damas, las Meninas y Los Infantes» (…). Exhibit for the first time «Los Apóstoles» at the Museo Del Hombre Dominicano (…). He build the «altarpiece» Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia en Higüey (…). With «Los Apóstoles,» Prats-Ventós takes part at the Expo Nueva Imagen de la Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. ` The decades 1970 and 1980, see an outstanding productive and exhibitions vitality in the master, who got the Dominican citizenship by the naturalization decree 1109, extended in 1971. That vitality multiplies him as a sculptor and a painter, on the basis of a sounded drawing skill that give form mainly to his unmistakable round faces icons, as well as his still lives, and landscapes where he combines a chromatic range handcrafted command. On top of that, his technic mastering of the basic plastic material substrates and extracts, flows with an apparent cold frugality, but lyric in the accuracy’s rationality where the Basque, Spanish or Dominican references join hands. «Drawing,» charcoal, 13x21 inch., no date. The piece of graphic strokes, part of the bank collection, seemingly results in an sculpture draft, due to the circular forms of its plan, on the base as in the curvatures defining thin and edgy resembling an abstract cubical enclosure.
404