WILFREDO ARCAY OCHANDARENA (Havana, 1925- Paris, 1997).Untitled.Oil on cardboard.Signed in the lower left area.Size: 100 x 81 cm; 117 x 97 cm (frame).Wilfredo Arcay was one of the referents of the Cuban school, managing to place his artistic production in the international market, and making Cuban painting stop being ascribed to a localist school, which followed the influences of other more valued schools of the time. To this end, he reinterpreted various artistic currents such as Cubism and Neo-Plasticism, adding his own personal idiosyncrasy, as well as the influence of the colour and light of his native country. In this particular work, through the use of colour, the work offers the spectator a new vitalist language, these flat, intense and bright tones are combined with a superimposition of geometric shapes with sober and simple lines. Their harmonisation with the colour used by the artist brings great dynamism and expressiveness to the piece.Hailed by Jean Arp as "the perfection of the Cuban Cubists", Arcay emerged among the post-war generation of the School of Paris as a painter, muralist and engraver. Arcay, born in Cuba and trained at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana, came to Paris on a scholarship in 1949. He quickly assimilated into the milieu of post-cubist abstraction, studying with Edgard Pillet and Jean Dewasne in their Abstrait art workshop. In 1951, at the invitation of André Bloc, the influential editor of the magazine Art d'Aujourd'hui, Arcay set up a studio at Bloc's villa in Meudon, mingling among such luminaries of the historical avant-garde as Jean Arp, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and Fernand Léger. While celebrated as a printmaker, Arcay painted alone during the 1950s and 1960s, sending work to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (1951-54) and regularly to Cuba. He exhibited as part of the Cuban delegation to the São Paulo Biennial (1955) and frequently at the Color-Luz Gallery in Havana, a pioneering outpost of geometric abstraction. A member of the constructivist Groupe Espace, founded by Bloc and Félix Del Marle in 1951, and the short-lived Cuban group Los Diez Pintores Concretos (1959-61), Arcay embodied the rich diversity and internationalism of post-war abstraction.