Havana, Cuba, 1958. lives and works in Cuba and Canada.

Antonio Eligio Fernández “Tonel” is an independent artist, art critic and curator. He graduated with a degree in Art History from the University of Havana in 1982. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California, in 2001, and was a visiting artist/lecturer at the Center for Latin American Studies and at the Department of Art and Art History in Stanford University, California, from 2001 to 2003. His articles and essays on Cuban and Latin American contemporary art are frecuently published in catalogues, magazines and books in Cuba and abroad. His works are in the collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany; the Van Reekum Museum in Apeldoorn, Netherlands; the Daros Collection in Zurich, Switzerland; the Department of Fine Arts at the Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom; the Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; the Arizona State University Museum in Tempe, Arizona; the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art in the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, among other institutions.

Tonel was the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities (1997-1998), with residency at The University of Texas, Austin, and the John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Painting and Installation Art (1995). He was awarded the Prize for Art Criticism by the Cuban Section of the International Art Critics Association (AICA) in 1988. In 2003 he received the Cuban Artists Fund Award (New York, USA). He is currently based in Vancouver, Canada, where he focuses on his own practice as a visual artist and writer, and teaches drawing and painting at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

In Tonel’s works the human (Cuban) body seems to become conscious of its own odors and fluids, with a compelling sensory intensity. Unlike some of his compatriots, Tonel is not interested in deconstructing historical narratives. He is a visceral explorer who ventures into territories that are taboo in art, setting his gaze on inconsequential, everyday moments.