Gilberto Hernández Escobar has written to Diario Libre's director, Aníbal de Castro, saying a painting called "Siamesas," which the newspaper had attributed to the Dominican artist Gilberto Hernández Ortega, is in fact a stylistic forgery.
In a letter published in the paper's Opinion section on September 16, 2026, Hernández Escobar said the error appeared in a Diario Libre article from September 4, 2026, headlined "Otra mirada al cuadro que la política USA vetó" ("Another look at the painting US politics vetoed"). He said the mistake showed up both in the caption beneath a photograph accompanying the piece and in the text of the article itself.
Hernández Escobar said "Siamesas" was not a genuine work by Hernández Ortega but what is known in the art world as a stylistic forgery, a piece that imitates the technical, formal and visual traits of an artist so it can be passed off as theirs. He described the practice as a common form of fraud in the art trade.
The disputed passage
The September 4 article had discussed a painting by the American artist Kehinde Wiley titled "Young Artists After Siamesas 1960," arguing that its title placed the work inside a Dominican artistic conversation. It said the word "after" pointed back to "Siamesas," credited to Hernández Ortega, and described how the Dominican painter's figuration, close to expressionism and surrealism, produced deformed bodies, unsettling settings and psychological relationships that were hard to read. The article said Wiley kept the interlocking of the central figures and the contact of hands and arms that unify the composition, while changing the atmosphere radically.
Hernández Ortega, who died in 1997, is regarded as one of the central figures of Dominican modern painting. Wiley is an American painter best known for his 2018 official portrait of former US President Barack Obama and for portraits that place contemporary Black subjects in poses drawn from historical European art.
Possible origin of the error
Hernández Escobar said the mistake likely came from statements Wiley himself had made about the origins of his own painting, adding that Wiley may not know that "Siamesas" is a stylistic forgery. He said the forged piece had been on display at Museo Bellapart, a private art museum in Santo Domingo, for some time before the forgery was identified and clarified.
Request for a correction
Hernández Escobar asked de Castro to make whatever correction or rectification he considered appropriate to the September 4 article, thanking him, as a Dominican artist, for the value he placed on Hernández Ortega's work, calling him a master among masters. He said he remained available to provide any further information that might be useful. The letter was signed from Santo Domingo.
