Luis Joaquin Rodriguez, naïf painter and leader of the Bayate group.

Santiago de Cuba, August 21 (RHC)-- The French Museum of Naif Art is promoting the work of painter Luis Joaquín Rodríguez, leader of the Bayate group, which settled some 30 years ago in the Santiago municipality of Julio Antonio Mella.

The review that accompanies that action, for which the Santiago artists thank Gerard Campagna, summarizes Rodriguez's career and the work of that pictorial initiative that reflects the landscape of the Cuban countryside from that brush that is neither so primitive nor so naive.

The publication exalts the international imprint of Bayate's creators and in particular their participation in the Santa Fe Folk Art Fair, in the state of New Mexico, in the United States, where they have transcended with their original and authentic pieces.

Dozens of exhibitions in Cuba and abroad, with works in permanent and private collections in Uruguay, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, the United States, Chile, Haiti, Brazil, Sweden and Switzerland, indicate the relevance of these creations from a community in this eastern province.

The Bayate Naif Art Gallery-Workshop, located in the historic urban center, is one of the axes of this artistic activity, which also includes a meeting in homage to Ruperto Jay Matamoros, a paradigm of that aspect.

Another facet of the group's projection is its insertion in the binational project on the presence of the Swedes in Bayate, which examines the traces of that colony that lived there during the first decades of the last century.

The endeavor brings together Cubans and experts from that European nation, from the University of Gothenburg, interested in making visible and protecting that material and cultural legacy, unique in the archipelago and largely reflected by these naive painters.