16 artists paid homage to Miguel de Cervantes at CAF Gallery

Many of us have the figure of legendary Don Quijote de la Mancha in our minds, but few of us can imagine his creator, Miguel de Cervantes. The most famous portrait was made by Juan de Jáuregui in the XVIth century, from a description of Cervantes himself in his texts. This was the basis used by Galeria CAF to highlight the invention of the writer's appearance by diverse contemporary artists, who were invited to interpret the face of the greatest writer in the Spanish language with their different and free visions. 

Starting tomorrow, the public will be able to enjoy the exhibition called "Imaginando a Cervantes" (Imagining Cervantes). With this show, CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, with the support of the Embassy of Spain and the collaboration of the Embassy of Peru, invites the Ibero-American community to imagine the writer in order to enrich his iconography on the 400th anniversary of his death. 

Enrique Garcia, CAF's Executive President, stated, "Through this window of Ibero-American cultural integration, once again we confirm our commitment to defend and promote the intangible heritage of the cultural wealth, in this case Hispanic, as an essential vehicle of communication and emotional expression of our civilization".  

Due to the lack of available versions of Cervantes' figure, when facing the reading of his work through his characters, the plastic artists create images that inevitably take them to wake up their alter ego, this "other" that allows them to identify themselves with any of the many existing psychological meanings in the writer's literature. 

Mariela Provenzali, the exhibition's curator, explained, "The invitation to imagine and represent the features of Miguel de Cervantes has been received with an unusual interest by the creators, approaching the invitation from the perspective of the literary work, whose narrative wealth constitutes in itself a biographic novel of the writer's life, full of diverse and dramatic episodes, with a vitality that the artists have been able to assimilate and, in some way, reflect in a display of images made with different materials and techniques, where most of these images have been sealed with the ever-present ruff". 

The artists that accepted CAF's invitation and expressed their vision of the greatest example of Hispanic literature, included Spanish artists Cristòfol Pons and Jordi Bernadó; Peruvian Jaime Romero; Bolivian Narda Zapata; and Venezuelans Ángel Hurtado, Abilio Padrón, Edgar Rodríguez larralde, Vasco Szinetar; Jorge Pizzani, Carlos Zerpa, Fernando Wamprechts, Francisco Bugallo, Francisco Pereira, Jonidel Mendoza, José Vivenes, and Marlon Herrera; 

Millenary painting techniques such as encaustics and tempera, sculptures, and photographs, among others, were used to show the variety of views regarding the two sides of the coin: the writer in flesh and bone, and the other as seen by his characters. The show may be seen at Galeria CAF, located on the ground floor of Torre CAF in Altamira.