René Peña

A self-taught photographer, René de Jesùs Peña Gonzàlez (La Habana 1957, Cuba) graduated in English at the Instituto Superior Pedagógico de Lenguas Extranjeras (ISPLE) of La Habana in 1978. He joined the national artistic world at the end of the 80’s, and entered in the new tendencies of the Cuban photography at the beginning of the 90’s, first dealing with interiors and domestic situations in his country, then going deeper in his own body with themes like negritude, sexual ambiguity, and the influence of consumerism and the market through self-portraits. He developed his series through a conceptual and formal analysis which is structurally different from all the parameters pre-established, going from a brutal expressionism to a marked homoeroticism, with strong mystic elements, plastic experiments and certain teatral treatment of the stage. The main axes of his work is the individual and his role in the society: he doesn’t try to explain phenomena or the history nor to provide evidence of something, but concentrates on the individual and his own armaments in front of his own life.

In the main body of his work the subject is himself, not because of a need of auto-reference but just
because of the will of using the human body as a medium for my analysis, without focusing on its race or sex. He uses the human body almost naked, without using many clothes or other elements
than can give to his work a marked temporal or geographical sense.