Carreno Mario Servando

Born on 24 June 1913: Mario Servando Carreño, Cuban painter.
— He studied at the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana (1925–1930), at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid (1932–1935) and at the École des Arts Appliqués in Paris (1937–1939). He lived in New York from 1944 to 1950. During the 1940s he was part of the Caribbean avant-garde that applied Cubist and Surrealist approaches to regional themes, producing paintings such as Caribbean Enchantment (1949). Widely traveled and stylistically diverse, in the 1950s he worked primarily in geometric abstraction, but after settling permanently in Santiago, Chile, in 1957, he integrated these Constructivist forms into dreamlike settings influenced by the Andean landscape and by the poetry of his friend, Pablo Neruda [1904–1973], as in Land of Volcanoes (1974). In the 1960s and early 1970s he treated the threat of nuclear war in paintings such as 20th-century Totem (1973), which depicts a column of mannequin fragments over a desolate terrain. In 1948–1949, again in the early 1980s, Carreño worked on the Antillanas series, which celebrates the lore and colors of the Caribbean.