About

Over the last two decades visual artist Tony Monsanto has been playing a leading role in the art scene on the Dutch Caribbean island Curacao and beyond. Born into a family of Surinam parents, Monsanto grew up in the Netherlands where afterwards he studied sculpture, drawing and architectural engineering. At the ‘Rijksakademie’, one of the most prestigious and leading art academies in Europe at that time, Monsanto finally felt intellectually stimulated and worked – as he says now – like a madman; producing hundreds of drawings, portraits, and spatial designs, extensively studying renaissance painters and modernist artists like Paul Klee and Max Ernst, which all formed the basis for a large part of his work during the rest of his career. As if this wasn’t enough he went over to the more technical side and proceeded by studying at the Technical University for Architecture in the city of Delft.
In the mean time life and love lead him towards Germany where, after finishing his degree, he started working as an engineer up to the point where there was no way denying it anymore: his soul was aching from a lack of visual arts, and the Caribbean smells of his first childhood memories. After a tumultuous journey where his work had touched an immense range of creative disciplines, he finally returned to Curacao in the eighties, with his family, to develop himself as a true Caribbean painter with an incredible craftsmanship, a striking eye for detail and composition and a palette that one can only find in this region. In the nineties and the beginning of the millennium Monsanto’s work was being exhibited all around the Caribbean, in the US, the Netherlands and even former Yugoslavia.

Without wanting to give away everything that will be unraveled in this book the short biography above clearly paints a picture of an exceptional artist.  The oeuvre of Tony Monsanto undeniably belongs to an important tradition of visual artists – some famous; some of them unfortunately are well kept secrets – who not only have had great influence on later generations and still remain to do so, but who are also working with – as the great Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera put it so strikingly – ”The curse of being completely surrounded by water”. For better and for worse…