Tony Bechara
Petrus, San Juan
Tony Bechara (Puerto Rico, 1943) is an interesting combination between an icon of New York’s Hispano-American society he studied at Georgetown University School of Law and the University of Paris (Sorbonne) ; he is a member of numerous and important boards of directors, and he is currently the chairman of the Board of Directors of El Museo del Barrio − and a dedicated painter within the field of Kinetic Abstraction and Op Art.
This refined artist began his career at the end of the 1970s and his works were quickly incorporated in distinguished private and public collections. Bechara has exhibited his recognizable works in the United States, as well as in Latin America and Europe. He has been invited to show his mystic and provocative compositions in venues ran- ging from El Museo del Barrio, when it began to gain momen- tum, to the Whitney Biennial.
Although Bechara has been a painter since the late 1970s, he has recently decided − and this does not imply it has been the first time − not only to make himself better known in his nati- ve Puerto Rico, but also to claim his well-deserved space in the art history of an island which has proved to be so rich in the field of the visual arts during the past three decades.
Apart from the intrinsic lyricism present in each of Bechara’s compositions, what has immediately aroused the public’s inter- est is the way in which he creates them. It is very simple. In the first place, this meticulous artist is naturally a poet within the field of abstraction, specifically as a firm believer in the aes- thetic possibilities of Kinetic Art and/or Op Art, always exhibi- ting not only an extraordinary virtuosity for the combination of colors and the creation of «experiences» which are extreme- ly pleasant and challenging due to their rhythms and spirituality but also his desire to experiment ; and in the second place, what characterizes his work is his patience, since each of his paintings is careful and painstaking game/sacrament that demands an incalculable number of hours from the artist. Bechara, who recently showed his work at the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, and participated − represented by Petrus Gallery − in Scope 09, reveals that he is familiar with and draws upon both the work of artists such as Piet Mondrian and Victor Vasarely and the proposals of the School of New York, Chuch Close or the Latin American kinetic artists (Cruz Diez, Soto, etc.), or the Puerto Rican artist Luis Hernández Cruz.
In the past few years, however, Bechara has reached a char- ming maturity and his compositions are increasingly less «mechanical» or too intellectually calculated and reflect, rather, the life of human beings from an existential point of view (the seasons of our lives), or also express the evolution, the harmo- nies of our planet (which we continue to jeopardize).
