Cuban painter, draughtsman and printmaker, naturalised French, born in 1928 in Manzanillo (Cuba), died in 2022 in Paris.
Life
Joaquín Ferrer studied at the School of Fine Arts in Havana and exhibited every year from 1954 to 1958 at the painting salon of the city’s Museum of Modern Art. In the Havana of the late 1950s he became friends with Jorge Camacho, a friendship shared with Agustín Cárdenas and Wifredo Lam.
With a grant from the Cuban Ministry of Education, he joined Camacho in Paris in 1960, at the Maison de Cuba in the Cité universitaire: this decisive year led them both to settle in France for good. Ferrer then worked in a studio in Pigalle. In 1962 he took part in the major exhibition “Art latino-américain” organised by Jean-Clarence Lambert at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
His meeting with Max Ernst was decisive: in 1968 his first Paris exhibition, with a preface by Ernst, took place at Jean Hugues’s Galerie Le Point Cardinal, which from then on regularly showed his work, alongside that of Ernst, Sima, Michaux, Cárdenas and Sánchez. He spent time with poets such as Alain Bosquet, Lionel Ray, Henri Michaux and Claude Esteban. He was naturalised French in 1979.
“[…] As for the young, I pity them. How can they not feel that everything has been done before them? It is wrong to make gods of them before they have even had time to express themselves. One of them, Ferrer, is something of a discovery of mine. Far from Pop Art, Mec’Art and their substitutes, he seems to me profoundly authentic […]” (Max Ernst, 1967)
The work
A painter, Ferrer also practised printmaking, as the catalogue “Peintures et gravures 1970-1971” of Le Point Cardinal already shows in 1971. Exile and nostalgia for Cuba run through part of his output. Some of his paintings belonged to Alain Bosquet.
Exhibitions and collections
- “Art latino-américain”, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1962
- Galerie Le Point Cardinal, Paris, from 1968 (catalogues in 1971, 1972 and 1977)
- Retrospective, Maison de l’Amérique latine, Paris, 30 May to 9 September 2017 (catalogue published by Hermann)
- Monograph published by Éditions Palantines
- “Joaquín Ferrer: transculturations artistiques”, study day, Maison de l’Amérique latine, Paris, 12 October 2026
- Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles: “At the Sources of Convulsive Beauty”, 25 October to 30 November 2024; “A Journey through Latin America”, 18 April to 31 May 2025; the gallery’s 25th anniversary exhibition, 22 May to 19 June 2026