Last March 30th, 2007 was inaugurated the exhibition Conversación en el huerto (Conversation at the garden) from the renowned contemporary artist Arturo Montoto at the exhibition room from the Villa Manuela gallery site on H street number 406 between 17 and 19 in Vedado.

This is the first time that Arturo Montoto exhibits his work at this gallery of the Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba) and for this occasion he presents a set of 12 pieces which he has called Conversación en el Huerto. The pieces conceived between a small and a medium format made with a mixed technique on cloth, discover the recurrent use of the objects that the artist has been making on the last few stages of his creation, but this time it has been contextualized again as magnified portraits.

In a recent interview to the poet and journalist Alex Fleites, called El oficio no es una desventaja (The trade is not a disadvantage) in December 2006 in Havana, Arturo Montoto comments: Sometimes someone gets surprised by something made by me, which is not recognized within the body of the work that has made me distinguishable within the field of visual arts in Cuba. However the pieces that I have shown recently, even though they have been made recently, do not answer to a new concept, but they go back to many years ago and they denounce my abstract-informal vocation. Starting from La Fábula del hortelano (The Fable of the Truck Farmer), the central object that characterizes almost all of my production has been magnified as if looking at it through a magnifying glass, it has abandoned the everyday being to invoke its permanence and main character in an undefined context that does not bother it, to get a focus on all of its double meaning and invoke its use, its abuse and over use. That means all of its possible connotations and significances. They are in my opinion some nowhere tools that dialogue with me in the garden.

This declaration has also been included as an addition within the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition and which will be found available during the time the sample by Arturo Montoto is being exhibited. This bilingual catalogue in Spanish and English contains an essay by the journalist, art critic and editor Andrés D. Abreu as well as every piece being exhibited.

In a fragment of his essay called El Cultivador (The Grower); the impending (re)conceptualization of Montoto, Andrés D. Abreu expresses: ... At the end of the sketch and as it was to expect, Montoto could not be entirely denied from his main creative exercise and it has emerged again from its anguish and its sense of unease by restructuring a timely system of painting for the translation of his most uncontrollable worries and sleepless nights. His urgency to free accumulated tensions and nostalgias has led him to strip his art from complicated inter-relations and loaded forms. He has preferred to bet on the object as the apparent winner but also as the defeated one, alone but painted, magnified but aged and in a bad way, almost dead in some pieces, wanting the only thing that is left them: for them to be remembered, so that their persistence in memory may activate a discourse for itself, beyond itself.