Jesus Fuertes Gomez (April 14th, 1938 - July 18th, 2006) was an autodidact Spanish painter, cartoonist, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist and interior designer.

During the Spanish Civil War, Fuertes' family escaped from Madrid to settle in Brussels. From a young age and because of his trips with his father who at the time was a poet and a fierce activist, Jesus Fuertes shaped his sense of esthetics mainly in France amongst an eclectic entourage of contemporary prominent artists from the last century.

During his young adult life, J. Fuertes choose his own instinct rather than be a follower of the institution of education.

In the sixties he set up his first studio in the heart of Paris, Montmartre. J. Fuertes was influenced greatly by the inventors of Cubism in France, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The young artist had the opportunity to know the impressive Picasso, who as a French speaking Spaniard highly contributed to J. Fuertes carrier.

In the seventies he transferred his studio in the South East coast of Spain, in the regions of the Levante. From his atelier set high up on a mountain just in front of the Mediterranean ocean, the young painter could imagine the Coast of Africa. J. Fuertes spent a full decade traveling and exploring new lands of  the African continent, where from its different ethnic groups he researched the roots of and learned the raw expressions of cubism. During his lifetime he was an avid collector of masks, sculptures and all kinds of arte facts from African tribes and American Indians people.

During the early seventies, he produced a multitude of ocean-life studies, most of them mainly oil on canvas. This vast collection is an important contribution to the first phases of cubism from the early 20th century in the Capital of France.

For J. Fuertes artistic' journey, the late seventies represented a pivot towards a renewal of cubism. Surrealism female nudes from the sixties made place to a sensual afro and racy woman during the seventies.

Those years also represented a self encounter with his Mediterranean Spanish roots.

His curiosity expanded his adventures to meet indigenous tribes like the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico in the late seventies, and the Xingu tribes from the Amazon in Brazil in the eighties.

In the eighties, the artist moved his studio with his family to the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

During this period, his cherished characters such as women, magicians, acrobats, clowns, musicians, Pierrot, jugglers, cats and birds, all appeared through the lens of a new perspective of cubism. A fusion of a "soft cubism" with a lively young tropical atmosphere emerged. In the lands of Brazil J. Fuertes tropical neo cubism flourished for more than a decade. 

In the nineties and the years after 2000, J. Fuertes resettled his studio in the Sunshine State of Florida where he could enjoy a cultural mosaic under a bright blue sky, and all that surrounded by a deep blue ocean.

Outline figures became more refined, oils with acrylics could combined and an important presence of the blue color were harmoniously organized on the canvas.

In a television interview J. Fuertes stated he would like to be remembered as "The Painter of the Blue" and this identification became his nickname during his late carrier.
A good example would be his famous "The blue Bull", interesting metaphor of a self-portrait, or another fun vision of his persona would be "Painting la calle ocho by Night" where he is flying over the 8th Street, the center of Cuban Life and culture in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood. Actually, from the years 2000 to 2004 he owned in the 8th Street the "Café Gallery 2000", a very interesting combination of a restaurant with a Fine Art Gallery.

In 2006 while putting together an exposition for China, J. Fuertes died from a heart attack in front of his easel.