In 1965, he traveled to France with his second Cuban wife as an invitee to the Paris Biennale that year, and they decided to stay, residing in the Casa de Cuba at the Cité Internationale. His works were exhibited at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris in 1967 and 1968. In his final year, he received the First Prize at the I Lignano Biennale (Italy) for his work “Science au service de l’Homme.”
After exhibiting several pieces at the Sorbonne during the events of May ’68, a few months later the couple managed to obtain permission from Cuban authorities to allow their young daughters Magda and Siena to leave the country, and they settled on Boulevard Saint-Jacques, where they fixed up the studio that he would work in until the end.
Following his early Parisian works, French art critic Alain Jouffroy described him in Opus International issue n.18 (June 1970) as:
“creator of a highly powerful work, which allows us to admire its irresistible ascent. His latest works, depicting movement as the theme and eroticism as the subject, bring us into a raw intimacy where the clumsiness of bodies in love is only topped by their frenzy, their dominant violence.”
www.ftn-books.com has now the Galerie Tallien catalog from 1973 available.
