GALLERY STAFF
Israel Moleiro
President
Daniela Alpizar
Assistant Dennys Matos
Curator
CATALOG
Rogelio López Marín (Gory)
Photography
Daniela Alpizar
Design and Layout
COVER (Details)
Mario Carreño, Allegory of a Cuban Landscape (Alegoría al Paisaje Cubano) 1943, Duco on canvas, 20 x 24 in
Servando Cabrera, I want (Yo quiero) 1976, Oil on canvas, 38 x 48 in
Manuel Mendive, Addie 2007, Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 60 in
Belkis Ayón, Siempre Vuelvo (I Always Return) 1994, Collograph, Ed. 1 of 6, 38 x 27 in
LATIN ART CORE
1646-48 SW 8th St.
Miami, FL, 33135
www.latinartcore.com
(305)-989-9085
Eight Decades of Cuban Figurative and Neo-Figurative Painting
by Dennys MatosI want to thank Israel Moleiro and Latin Art Core, Miami, for supporting this Eight Decades of Cuban Figuration and Neo-Figuration from the very beginning. We had previously joined forces for the exhibition Ramón Alejandro vs Elio Rodríguez (CCE, Miami, 2019), but this is the first time I have been invited to develop a project at the headquarters of this gallery in the still very Cuban neighborhood of Little Havana. That exhibition, due to its concept, can be considered the embryo or the prelude to what we are inaugurating today. In the 2019 catalog, it said, the exhibition ‘Ramón Alejandro vs Elio Rodríguez’ brings together the work of two Cuban neo-figurative artists from very different generations and trajectories, but both attracted to reinterpret the Cuban pictorial and sculptural tradition of the 20th century with overflowing sensuality.
They assume its contemporaneity as a synthesis between the popular and high culture, between eroticism and sexuality, resisting to believe in the dominant representations of power and self-affirmative politics. So in a certain sense, Eight Decades of Cuban Figuration and Neo-Figuration is the continuity of those ideas, now in an expanded format.
In Eight Decades of Cuban Figuration and Neo-Figuration, more than eight generations of (neo) figurative Cuban art coexist. Here, an overview of visual arts is outlined, overlooking the development of figurative and neo-figurative poetics. Articulating a chronology that spans from the beginning of the 1940s of the 20th century to the beginning of the 2020s of the 21st century. A period whose understanding must be punctuated by three important
moments in the contemporary history of Cuba. First, and as a precedent, the independence of Spain in 1898. Second, the triumph of the revolution in 1959, which leads to a dictatorship promoting radical changes in the name of an utopian communist society through social violence and political repression.
Third, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disappearance of the Socialist Bloc, highlighting the resounding failure of the Castroist dictatorship and utopian communist ideology.
Republic and Post-Colonial Inheritance
Although Cuba’s independence from the Spanish colonial empire occurred in 1898, following Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-Cuban-American War, it was not until 1902 with the establishment of the Republic that the island acquired the status of an independent state. By that time, the US occupying troops had already been withdrawn. Cuba thus put an end to
Spanish colonialism after more than 4 centuries, but with the approval of the 1901 Constitution, which included the Platt Amendment, its independence was skewed and it became a neo-colony of the United States.
A period of economic prosperity (“fat cows”) begins, marked by American investments supported by the capitalist engine that rapidly transforms both the rural and urban landscape. The two World Wars caused a considerable increase in agricultural and industrial production, generating great wealth that, distributed unevenly, fostered social injustice. Beneath this development, a creole bourgeoisie grows, whose ideology begins to advocate for values for a national state with greater independence from US tutelage. In this context, the first Cuban artistic vanguards emerge and develop, finding in the Free Workshop of Painting and Sculpture (1937), led by Mariano Rodríguez and René
Portocarrero, a renewing aesthetic nucleus. Together with other artists such as, for example, Wifredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, Mario Carreño, and Rita Longa, they evolve from figurative poetics that aspire to represent the discourse of the Cuban national state and its cultural identity, marked by postcolonial complexity. It is the moment where the debate on Cubanness recreates its two fundamental inheritances: the transcultural hybridization between Spain and Africa. Rural landscape, or the urban landscape that intertwines colonial and post-colonial periods, Afro-syncretic ritual, are representations that combine cultured and popular elements as part of the modern philosophical project of sociocultural development.
Revolution and Totalitarianism
Fulgencio Batista’s coup on March 10, 1952, suspended the 1940 Constitution, establi-
shing a dictatorship that undermined the functioning of the still weak democratic institutions that aspired to consolidate the Cuban nation-state. The growing discontent with this situation dramatically precipitated with the triumph of the revolution in 1959, which represented a radical rupture with certain values of previous cultural traditions and complexified these discourses.
Neo-figuration, as the dominant pictorial poetics, makes its way into the proposals of the new generations that will redefine the perception of the national being and cultural identity, mediated by the ideology of the revolutionary cultural policy. In this stage of the 1960s, works by artists such as Antonia Eiriz, Zilia Sánchez, and Servando Cabrera emerge. Later, in the late 1970s, artists like Mendive and Fabelo stand out, echoing an imaginary whose visual codes combine both Western and African heritage in
Cuban cultural identity. But thematically, unlike the early vanguards, they maintain a critical distance from these sources and inheritances.
The Mariel and The Fall of the Berlin Wall
In 1980, the massive emigration through the Mariel Port revealed the social-political disagreement with the ideas of the revolution in its claim that its project had unanimous popular approval. There is a rebirth of visual arts, where previous generations coincide with younger ones in creative intensity, creating a rich constellation of neo-figurative painting such as in the cases of Humberto Castro or Zaida del Río. The body, as a source of overflowing expression of desire, begins to have a prominence in pictorial symbology, responding to the homogenization of mass culture and social political repression.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 implies the failure of the revolutionary utopia, and the art of these years becomes more parodic and, above all, more cynical. Neo-figurative poetics incorporate narrative elements from cinema and television, expanding the field of painting as in the works of César Santos, but this expansion also occurs in the field of sculpture with the work of The Merger. Alpízar and the works of Belkis Ayón parody the statements of the cultural policy of the revolution. A cultural policy that had skewed history in favor of achieving total control of the individual and society under the thick mantle of dictatorship.
ARTISTS LIST:
Wifredo Lam
Mario Carreño
Amelia Peláez
Mariano Rodríguez
René Portocarrero
Antonia Eiríz
Agustin Cardenas
Servando Cabrera
Rita Longa
Zilia Sánchez
Zaida del Rio
Tomas Sanchez
Roberto Fabelo
Manuel Mendive
Pedro Pablo Oiva
Humberto Castro
Belkin Ayón
Rubén Alpízar
The Merger
Raiman Rodríguez
César Santos
Ramon Alejandro
