While Andy Warhol was creating his Campbell's soup screen print and Marilyn Monroe diptych in 1962, a young Cuban was designing his first political posters: his various versions of Che Guevara in a ultra-modern duotone would also become iconic. Félix Beltrán was barely 24 years old, but he had already trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York and had worked for the powerful advertising agency McCann Erickson Co., where he entered as an assistant at the age of 15 due to his precocious talent. Son of a humble family and opponent of the Fulgencia Batista dictatorship, the young and idealistic Beltrán believed in a Revolution that would bring social justice to Cuba.
Publisher: Ediciones Complutense Year of publication: 2023 Available in Ediciones Complutense: here and here. Available in Unebook: here and here.
After rubbing shoulders in New York with Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Richard Avedon (he took a photography course in his studio) or the design totum Milton Glasser (who let him attend his classes even if he wasn't enrolled), Beltrán returned to Cuba in in 1962 and drew the posters of a revolution that "gradually became a failure", in his own words. So he ended up leaving for Mexico. But Beltrán did make his own revolution: that of a timeless and universal design, worthy of a museum.
«Simple is what does not have more and does not have less. The complex is what has not been positioned and has not been made clear”, the designer used to say in his own version of Mies van der Rohe's less is more. When Beltrán talks about simplicity, he refers to the right point, the perfect balance, which made him one of the greatest references in graphic design in Latin America.
He passed away on December 28, 2022 at the age of 84, in the Mexico that was his home for decades, the legacy of Félix Beltrán is updated with the reissue of two essential volumes that compile his thoughts and his main texts: Visual Intelligence and Always the design, by Ediciones Complutenses and with an exhibition of the same name at the Centro de Arte Complutense that can be seen until April 23.
"The visual intelligence of Félix Beltrán is born from a continuous search based on theoretical foundations and compositional strategies where form and content work in perfect balance," explain its editors, teachers Sonia Díaz and Gabriel Martínez.
Throughout his career, Beltrán has won more than 140 awards, participated in more than 60 solo exhibitions (and more than 450 group shows), and created powerful images that are not forgotten, such as the powerful 1971 portrait of activist Angela Davis to demand his liberation or the famous Clik in yellow letters, an effective poster to save electricity that synthesizes all his thoughts. Posters for Iberia, the Olympics or Apple... Beltrán designed a whole gallery of icons, transforming signs and letters into powerful symbols.
"Beltrán's visual iconospheres are not an isolated ecosystem, they collect varied influences, sometimes even contradictory ones -communism versus capitalism- and they manifest themselves as a system in continuous dialectical tension that confronts different arguments and ideas", highlight its editors.
In the manner of the theoretical Kandinsky in his mythical Punto y línea sobre el plano (where he collected his teachings at the Bauhaus), Beltrán analyzed the strokes and meanings of letters, colors and fonts from practice but also from a more philosophical perspective. Nothing is lacking or excessive.
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