• Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2013
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2014
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2015
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2014
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2017
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2015
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2017
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2017
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2017
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2017
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2017
  • Oil pastel on paper, 21.5x27.5cm, 2017
Duniesky Avila Bordas
Artemisa, 1984

During his childhood, Duniesky never had any approach to art and also his family had nothing to do with art. He finished his studies as a teacher in an accelerated course in a moment where there was a great need of teachers at a national level. Given the difficult conditions and the low salaries at the educational sector, he decided to quit his teacher’s profession and found a job as an economic specialist at a warehouse's company. However, after a while, and because of his need for financial improvement, he committed a crime of theft and usurpation of company's values and he was sanctioned with three years of privation of freedom.
During his time in prison at the penitentiary he started an initial approach to drawing as a way to occupy his free time, but basically to protect and isolate his mind from the oppressive context where he was. Drawing represented at that point the only one way to relieve the stress and the depression which he underwent permanently. He was using any material that he may manage to get and many times using as a table for drawing his own bed’s bottom table. He discovered a singular and very particular world within his own mind and a singular creativity when he tried to capture a world of different humanoid faces with hard features and stressed challenging gazes, materialized on papers. Each drawing he made was given to his mother, who decided to preserve them.
Duniesky's faces became a graphic legend, a form of social scanner where individual expresses, beyond his facial features, different human conditions very characteristic of the prison social groups, revealing many prisoner's true nature to us. When winding up his sanction and becoming incorporated again to the society, Duniesky did not abandon the drawing. Even though evidently the context that motivated him to do it for the first time changed, he never forget those moments of darkness and nowadays he continues drawing his singular world of characters. Now, the universe of his images are even broader, there is a bigger heterogeneity of expressions and he includes more show-off characters.