On-Off Print

Luis Enrique “Silvestre” Guerra is a contemporary Cuban artist, born in 1966 in Havana but raised in Hershey (a Cuban model town founded by the chocolate tycoon around a sugar plant in 1916). At the age of 16, he moved back to Havana to continue his studies. He had brief passages at the Escuela Provincial de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro (San Alejandro Provincial Arts School) and the ISDI Istituto Superior de Diseño (Superior Institute of Design) before he landed a job as Graphic Designer at the Bohemia Magazine - first news and culture magazine in Latin America, published in Cuba since 1908. His work and experiences with Havana cultural environment led to his first artworks, a series of gouache over carton drawings that earned him a Mention at the 1988 Salón de la Ciudad de Havana, and an invitation to join the prestigious ISA (Superior Institute of Arts), where he was mentored by artists such as Flavio Garciandía, Eduardo Ponjuán, and Osvaldo Sanchez, exponents of the 80’s Generation movement. Silvestre decided to leave Cuba and move to Brasil in 1999, after a decade of severe effects of the “Periodo Especial” (an economic crisis sparked by the fall of the Soviet Republics). He now lives and works in the creative Vila Madalena neighborhood in São Paulo. . He had individual shows at the National Museum of Fine Arts (Rio de Janeiro – Brazil), the Cultural Center Laurinda Santos Lobo (Rio de Janeiro – Brazil), and group shows at the Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador), the Wilfredo Lam Center (Havana - Cuba), Berini Gallery (Barcelona – Spain), and the Latin American Art Pavillion at the Red Dot Fair in Miami.