Jeannine Achón

Biography

Jeannine Achón’s first solo exhibition opened in 2005 on the Isle of Youth, at the gallery of the Hermanos Saíz Association (Asociación Hermanos Saíz, a Cuban organisation for young artists). It was called “La Puerta Perdida” (“The Lost Gate”), after one of the paintings, and consisted entirely of abstract works in acrylic on canvas, of medium size.

Since then, apart from a few commissions, she has produced practically no figurative painting.

She was born in Havana on 14 January 1973. After secondary school at the Lenin school she entered the Higher Institute of Industrial Design (ISDI) and graduated in 1996, specialising in housing. For a couple of years she worked at the design firm Decoro d’Arq on hotel projects, among them the Hotel Nacional and the Capri. By the end of the 1990s she had turned to fine art, first figurative painting and illustration. She made scientific illustrations for Alfonso Silva Lee’s book “Mi Libro de Lagartijas” (“My Book of Lizards”) and drawings for children’s books, all for the same publisher, Editorial Gente Nueva.

Her painting of the late 1990s and early 2000s is still largely figurative, but it already contains what her abstract work would later rest on: a structure of multiple layers, acrylic on paper or canvas, and fairly bright colour. She sold her work then in the art markets of Old Havana and Vedado, where foreign tourists and young Cuban artists meet.

Her second solo exhibition took place in 2008 in the lobby of the Hotel Sevilla in Havana, a fine example of Cuba’s colonial architecture. About a dozen paintings were hung from a structure running between the eight columns of the main hall, and the title repeated a slogan from the official posters of the time: “No Mentir Jamás” (“Do not ever lie”). The curator was Toni Piñera, a critic and columnist on Cuban art who long directed the gallery La Acacia. In late 2009 she organised an exhibition at the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC): fifteen new large-format paintings under the title “Las Intermitencias del Color” (“The Intermittences of Colour”). The title was suggested by Roland Petit’s ballet “Proust, or the Intermittences of the Heart”, based on the work of Marcel Proust. Piñera was again the curator. On opening day the jazz pianist Harold López-Nussa, a friend of the painter, played a piece from his album “Sobre el Atelier”, composed in memory of his grandfather Leonel López-Nussa, a Cuban painter, writer and art critic. In 2007–2009 she also took part in group exhibitions in Spain (at the University of Madrid) and in Cuba, during the Havana Biennial.

In 2010 Achón left Cuba and settled in Zagreb. Since 2015 she has lived in France, first in Toulouse, then in Aussillon in the department of Tarn.

In Zagreb she spent two years painting fifteen large pictures, grouped as the series “Ashé”. The word names a concept in Cuban culture and spiritual tradition: the primordial breath, vital energy, the soul of the world. The paintings are named after orishas, the deities of that tradition. She has said that when she paints she tries to open doors and paths to the imagination, and sees a painting not as a mirror but as a passage to other people and to one’s own inner life. I think that formulation also explains her turn away from representation.

In April 2013 the series was first shown in Varaždin, at the Galerijski Centar Varaždin, with Ivan Mesek as curator. In May of that year the exhibition moved to the Galerija Matice Hrvatske in Zagreb, where the curator was Professor Vanja Babić.