Henri Cueco

Chiens Courants (Running Dogs)
1993
140 x 162 cm
Acrylic on canvas

The work

This acrylic painting is part of the Dogs series, painted between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s.
It is an almost square work on a white background like a large sheet of paper. It features the silhouettes of the same animal, a dog in full length and parts of its anatomy, all running towards the right of the viewer. Black and white dominate the canvas, while a large gray diagonal axis anchors the composition, balanced by the heads at the top left and bottom right. Seven small red spots in the animal’s open mouth add a touch of aggression. Light brushstrokes of a dirty yellow on some of the hooves add a certain context to the animal’s run.
Each part of the body and each figure is catalogued with a tiny reference letter and a number that establishes a contrast between the dynamic accumulation and the established order, typical of the objectivity of a catalog.

The artist

(Uzerche, France, 1929 – París, 2017)

Henri Cueco was born in Uzerche, a town in the Limousin region of Occitania, France, in 1929, with the name Henri Aguilella Cueco, to a Valencian father and a French mother. He died in Paris in 2017 at the age of 86.
In the 1950s, Cueco actively participated in the revival of figurative art when abstraction began to weaken, both because of its immobility in the face of changes in post-war French society and because of a decorative and complacent tendency that had become established in the previous decade.
Cueco was part of a group of young artists who rethought the problems of reality and meaning in art at a specific moment in history, the 1960s. He participated in the 1964 exhibition Everyday Mythologies, which gave rise to the Narrative Figuration group.
His left-wing political commitment and desire for social change led to his prominent participation in the Salon de la Peinture Jeune from 1952 to 1963, as well as in the Popular Workshop of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the May 1968 uprising. This period can be considered to have ended in 1972 after the major exhibition 1960-1972. Twelve Years of Contemporary Art in France.
He developed a style of painting in which figuration is combined with a political commitment linked to nature, relationships between men and women, and the connections between different forms of language, whether written, spoken, painted, or drawn. A multifaceted artist, he was also a screenwriter, theater set designer, and writer.