An Abundant Life - Sense Memory

Danilo Peguero is an Artist, Portrait Painter, and Art Professor from the Dominican Republic who I met recently at ESKFF, the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation, where he was part of the Residency Program this fall. When I first met him, it was before the celebratory dinner for the Residents and invited guests, and I didn't have a chance to see his work until a few weeks later at the closing celebration. On that afternoon when I visited, I stopped by his studio and introduced myself, and the first piece that caught my eye was on the wall near the entrance to his space. It was a large painting, very colorful, with lines and shapes that made up two major figures, a boy and a donkey in a style that echoed other painters like Picasso and Matisse whose work I love, but that was entirely something new and vital that I had never seen before. When I asked him about the painting, he told me a story about his son who had been given a donkey to care for, and while Danilo was traveling and was away from his family, he had been hearing about the love his son had for the animal and how much he was enjoying taking care of it and learning about the life of it that Danilo decided to create the painting for his son to connect with him and in some way create a bond of being a part of his son's experience though they were apart. It was a simple story, but there was something in the way that he told it and in the life of the painting that brought a feeling to me of the love and care and joy that Danilo felt for his son and the sweetness of the experience of a child learning how to care for and nurture an animal and by extension the connection and bond that was being nurtured for the natural world.

When I walked into the studio and began to look at the other pieces, I knew immediately that I was seeing something extraordinary. As we spoke, Danilo told me that he was a portrait painter and he showed me some of those pieces in photographs in his portfolio. He is highly skilled, having studied in the National School of Fine Arts in the Dominican Republic and graduating as an Art Professor, he later made political cartoons for Cachafú and sports cartoons for the newspaper El Caribe, also working as Art Director, Cartoonist and Illustrator in several Advertising Agencies in Santo Domingo and New York. He has designed many record covers for the Hispanic market in New York, and also worked for GTE Páginas Amarillas in the Dominican Republic, starting as Art Supervisor and later becoming Production Manager. He studied portrait painting with private teachers in New York in the 1980's, and the portraits he creates are very beautiful and have a sense of life and vitality to them that is found in the work of painters who have a very strong sensitivity to the emotional life of their subjects.

The work that he created in his ESKFF Residency is completely different in style, modern and somewhat surrealistic it still maintains the integrity of a classically trained Artist in its form and balance and composition while opening up the imagination and vision with colors and images and shapes that give life to what could be dream sequences, memories or interpretations and projections of events and ideas from every day life. It is hard to say what is the most entrancing about Danilo's work - the juxtaposition of colors, or shapes that have a bolder and more vivid echo of Juan Gris, or the stark imagery and haunting characters that are reminiscent of Goya, or Velázquez and Picasso whose reflected interpretations of "Las Meninas" he was reinterpreting at the suggestion of Eileen Kaminsky in his own style that is even more dreamlike while still being visceral in the way that lucid dreams are.

I introduced Danilo to the Gallerist Paul Calendrillo because I knew that the work was something new and exciting in the way that work that comes from a deep place of sensitivity can be. There is so much in Danilo Peguero's pieces and all of it great, and I'm looking forward to seeing where his imagination, vision and skill will lead him, and his audience, next.

Danilo Peguero

At The Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation (ESKFF)

Fall Residency Program

At Mana Contemporary

888 Newark Avenue

Jersey City, New Jersey

https://www.eskff.com/


A Story Of His Son And His Donkey

A Meeting With Gallerist Paul Calendrillo

His Personal Vision Of "Las Meninas"

Self Portrait In Front Of A Mirror

Blessings,

Jannie Susan