Tonel is known as a member of the "80s generation" in Cuba. The centrality of self-portraiture and parody in Tonel’s work is evident in this recent portfolio of lithographs. Verses of Boleros accompany vignettes of the artists’ life on the road, or as he tells us, when he was in "Rheinlandia", the artist’s Hispanic misnaming of Rheinland. Tonel’s work draws on a strong Cuban tradition of cartoon and political satire.
Tonel, Antonio Eligio Fernandez, was born in HAVANA Cuba in 1958 just one month before the Cuban revolution. He has studied art history at the University of Havana with the faculty of arts and letters graduating in 1982. He started showing his art work in 1973 as part of the exhibitions of young Cuban artists of that time. He had his first solo exhibition in Havana in 1981. From 1983 to 1990, he worked as curator, writer, and advisor for different projects at the Division of Visual Arts in the Ministry of Culture in Havana.
One of the most important projects he worked on between 1986-90 was called Telarte which was a project where he worked with international artists who designed patterns that COULD be and WAS printed on cloth in a Cuban factory becoming clothing, and other product of cloth, curtains, tablecloths, and so on . In this project Cuban artists and other international artists participating designing art for the textiles. The project brought together such incredible artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Shigeo Fukuda, Herve Telemaque, Louis Camnitzer (author of Art in Cuba highly recommend for beginning students of Cuban art).
In 1990 he co-curated the "Cuba OK" a show for the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf in Germany That show became the core of the Peter Ludwig collection of Cuban art which was acquired between 1990-92 for the Ludwig Museum in Aachen, Germany.. Subsequently the Ludwig Foundation opened an office in Havana which is dedicated to promote Cuban contemporary art and in fact is working with our foundation with the trip to the Bienniel Nov 14-Nov 22
Tonel has been an artist in residence at the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; the Tulley House Museum and art gallery in Carlisle, England; the University of Northumbria, Newcastle England; He is a John S. Guggenheim Fellow in painting and installation art and a Rockefeller Fellow in the Humanities. As a Rockefeller Fellow he was a senior researcher at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas in Austin in 1998.
Since the early 80s he has frequently published academic articles and essays in magazines and catalogs in Cuba and abroad. He has worked as tutor at the (ISA) Institute Superior de Arte in Havana and at the University of Nothumbria in Newcaslte and the University of Havana. His art work is now here in our gallery as well as permanently in private and public collections including museums in U.S., Cuba, Europe, and Asia. In a free moment when art is not involved he loves to watch baseball. He has one son, 12 years old in Cuba just entering high school,
Marilyn Zeitlin, the Director of the Art Museum at Arizonia State University and curator of the Cuban art show that was here at the Austin Museum of Art 2000, talks about Tonel; "Tonel is among those Cuban intellectuals who have both a deep knowledge of Cuban culture both in the present and historically, and a link to the outside world. he often uses bridges as metaphors in his work and in one, he uses a self-portrait of his own body as a bridge. As a communicator between our two very different cultures, he does a service to both.
