Danco Duportai Garcia

Danco Robert Duportai Garcia
b. 1997
Holguin, Cuba
lives and works in Mexico City, MX

Duportai Garcia studied at the Provincial Academy of Fine Arts, Eduardo Abela, in San Antonio de Los Baños then went on to graduate from The National Academy of Fine Art, San Alejandro, in Havana. The artist began painting “consciously” at the age of ten leading to what he likens to a compulsion. “I paint every day, and if I’m not painting, I’m thinking about painting. It’s a vice, a ritual...”

“‘Tartamudeando’, or Stuttering, is a series of paintings over staples where the concept is sustained by a passing feeling, a memory from which I leave to build and unmask the same image that vanishes, forming a multiplicity of emotions poured into minimal spaces. My painted characters wander all the time, through the visual sensation supported by the breakable and fragile.”

The concept for the series “Tartamudeando” came while the artist was in Aruba attending a residency program focused on amnesia. Danco befriended a person with amnesia who carried small photos in his pockets as reminders. In searching for a small format medium, the artist found the perfect metaphor in staples. Fragile and breakable, they can come apart and be rearranged as with memory. Though the work is protected and carefully handled with gloves, rust is the inevitable, it is the aging of the medium, a part of the process.

Danco Robert Duportai Garcia has shown his work in Havana, Paris and Los Angeles, as well as in the PAN Museum of Contemporary Art, Naples, Italy.

Currently, Duportai Garcia is working on a two year long project with Conde Contemporary titled “Tokens of Memory : The Miniature Portrait Project”. The exhibition will feature a massive collection of diminutive portraits by the young Cuban artist Danco Robert Duportai Garcia. The project is naturally indicative of Duportai Garcia’s body of work which consists primarily of small format paintings, replete with concepts of token and memory. Please click here for more information on the project, or click the button below to commission a portrait in the series.

Duportai Garcia currently lives and works in Mexico.