CubaPLUS Magazine

Perhaps to some people it may seem impossible to paint at the bottom of the sea. But it is true, at the Punta Perdiz International Diving Center, about 11 kilometers from Playa Girón, on the southern coast of the province of Matanzas, in those beautiful seabeds you can find an art gallery and a workshop studio, where the plastic artist Sandor González Vilar is ecstatic, creating his art with fish and other marine species.

At this site, the director of Galería Transeúntes, founded the underwater headquarters in December 2014. Some years before, he had known the place when he went diving for the first time first with his Mexican friend Emilio Solorzano Lescale (El Güey). Impacted by the beauty of the environment and motivated to extend artistic creation to places unimaginable people created, together with other colleagues in the field, this atypical gallery, which today is dedicated especially to the memory of El Güey.

Thanks to the characteristics of the marine relief of this area, the new variant of cultural tourism in Cuba, is associated with the natural environment. It is a proposal aimed at encouraging and promoting the beauties of the region's landscape from the artistic optics. A complex made up of three art galleries has been arranged on land and under the sea interchangeably by González Vilar.

Inside an old 19th century building, they expose the canvases, painted on the seabed for a period of time that can reach more than 90 minutes. Photographs and videos are also shown there that record the process of making the pieces. One hundred meters from the shore and six meters deep, is the "studio-workshop", where the pictures are painted in oil on an easel fixed to the bottom of the sea at two hundred meters. Then, with a depth that ranges between 12 and 16 meters, the other room is located.

Exhibition, in which 11 ceramics created and painted on earth are permanently displayed, in the workshop of the artist Lázaro Valdés Pérez (Matacochino), located in the town of Calabazar, in the capital municipality of Boyeros. With this proposal, nature and art lovers can practice modalities of nautical activities such as diving, while enjoying a unique exhibition of its kind in Cuba with a great variety of corals, gorgonians, sponges and schools of multicolored tropical fish.

They coexist in harmony with the works of plastic arts located there, and also with the public  attending to contemplate them. Other activities have been specially designed for the underwater gallery based on an unforgettable experience.

In this sense, the first submarine marriage was held in Cuba in 2015, a wedding surrounded by art and nature.