IRREVERSIBLE Pablo Cano

Untitled-1 1

11/18/10 1:13 PM

Untitled-1 2

11/18/10 1:13 PM

Sketch of Jaques Prevert portrait by Pablo Picasso, 1954

IRREVERSIBLE MAGAZINE PUBLISHER/EDITOR Norelkys (Noor) Blazekovic norelkysb@irreversiblemagazine.com Contact: 786- 444-2790 ASSOCIATE EDITOR Carla Rover Is an independent curator and writer based in Miami.

CURATOR Alejandro Mendoza Artist/ Curator base in Miami CONTRIBUTORS Kathryn McSweeney Is an Independent Curator based in New York City Jonathan Rose Culture in the City / President Cultureinthecity.wordpress.com Carlos Suarez De Jesus Art Critic GRAPHIC DESIGN Ricardo Javier Nunez ricardo.j.nunez@gmail.com PHOTOGRAPHY Mariano Costa Peuser FILM & VIDEO Alfonso Vasquez Special Thanks to: Aldo Castillo, Associate Director, MIA | Miami International Art Fair

Jacques Prévert, France’s most widely read poet since Victor Hugo, was born in Paris in 1900. He left school in 1915 and worked at various jobs until 1920 when he served in the military in Lorraine and with the French occupation forces in Turkey. In 1925 he began to associate with the surrealists, including André Breton and Louis Aragon. “Expelled” from this group by Breton in 1930, because of his “occupation or character”, he responded with a savage satirical attack on Breton in “Death of a Gentleman”. His first poems were published in the same year, and in 1931 appeared his first major success: “Attempt to Describe a Dinner of Heads in Paris - France”, subsequently published in Paroles.

Jacques Prévert life was a huge inspiration for this issue. Each day in my life I am meant to establish a perpetual revolution, one meant to disrupt and then to organize not only art but society.

To me the key to these revolutionary art forms and attitudes is found in the works of the artists, writers, critics and curators who in a daily basis are raising a voice all over the world in their very unique way: 2010 has been an incredible year for our project I would like to offer my deepest thanks to IRREVERSIBLE friends and family for their endless support : Lucinda Linderman, Alejandro Mendoza, Pablo Cano , Tomas Esson, Laura Jaimeson, Winsome Bolt, Jacqueline Lewis, Bonnie Clearwater & Ricardo Pau Llosa.

Our faith in art and our altered physiological states are forming a lasting legacy. We succeed in this revolution by opening new doors of perception, developing an alternate vision which remains an effective part of the assumptions and ideas surrounding art today. My long lasting commitment is to inspire all and to pass along to future generations the legacy of our span of time and ideas which form a large part of the most stimulating art in the 21 century.

I am constantly on the lookout for what is meaningful in my era. Art is a language possibly more important than words as it directly assails the emotions and senses. Irreversible is a collective adventure, we want to reach everyone, adults and children and we want to make sure that we all remember that most adults have difficulty dreaming... and I have a somewhat childish desire to bring our dreams back.

This Love This love So violent So fragile So tender So hopeless This love As beautiful as the day And as wretched as the weather When the weather is wretched This love So real This love So beautiful So happy So joyous And so ridiculous Trembling with fear Like a child in the dark And so sure of itself Like a tranquil man in the quiet of the night This love Which made others afraid Which made them gossip Which drained the colour from their cheeks This love Watched for Because we watched for them Snared, wounded, trampled, finished, denied, forgotten Because we snared, wounded, trampled, finished, denied, forgot it This love Entire Still so alive Shining This is yours This is mine This love Which is always new And which never changes Real like a plant Quivering like a bird Warm and as alive as the summer We can both Go and come back We can forget And fall asleep And wake up To suffer old age Fall asleep again

To dream to death Awake To smile and laugh Young again Our love endures Obstinate as a mule As alive as the desire As cruel as the memory As stupid as the regret As tender as the memory As cold as marble As beautiful as the day As delicate as an infant It watches us Smiling And speaks to us Without saying a word And I I listen to it Trembling And I cry I cry for you I cry for myself And I beg you For yourself For me And for all those who love And who are loved Yes I cry to it For you For me And for all the others I do not know Stay there There where you are There where you were before Stay there Don’t move Don’t go away We who are loved We have forgotten you Do not forget us We had only you on this earth Do not let us grow cold Further and further away every day It doesn’t matter where Give us a sign of life In a nook in the woods In the forest of memory Suddenly arise Take us by the hand And save us Jacques Prévert

Noor Blazekovic

Celebrating 2010

Left to right: Alejandro Mendoza & Noor Blazekovic / Tina Cornelly Miami Art Museum & Dora Valdés-Faulí Arteamericas Fair Director / Alejandro Mendoza & Frank Hyder / Henry Bermudez / Sergio Garcia/ Pablo Cano / Alejandro, Noor & Nathaniel / Bonnie Clearwater, Executive Director & Chief Curator Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami & Lucinda Linderman / Noor Blazekovic & Henry Bermudez / Jonathan Rose / Miguel Fleitas / Winsome Bolt / Rocio Laucerica & Nathaniel Jones / Alejandro Mendoza, Margarita Cano, Pablo Cano & Noor Blazekovic / Giants in the City Summer Event Miami Beach Botanical Garden / IRREVERSIBLE Miami Art Museum installation Ysee Gaudel / “Viva Cuba Libre” Installation Freedom Tower / Noor Blazekovic & Lucinda Linderman IRREVERSIBLE upcycled Special art project Mia Art Fair 2009 / “Untitled” Irreversible Arteamericas Installation (detail) Aldo Castillo / “Untitled” Irreversible Arteamericas Installation Project Collaboration: Alejandro Mendoza, Pablo Cano, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Alex Heria, Lucinda Linderman & Leonel Matheu 6” Diameter x 25” height / Gino Tozzi / Tomas Oliva, Anja Marais, Sergio Garcia,Yovani Bauta & Miguel Rodez / Mariano Costa Peuser / Tomas Esson & Tony Barrio Nuevo / Ricardo J. Nuñez / GIANTS IN THE CITY Summer event at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden 2010 photo by Elsa Roberto / Maki Hashizume, Noor Blazekovic & Alejandro Mendoza/ Laura Jaimeson, Rick Erens, Bernice Steinbaum, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Noor Blazekovic, Mireille Gonzalez, Alejandro Mendoza & Lucinda Linderman / Edouard Duval-Carrié “Le Serpent” for GIANTS IN THE CITY / Alejandro Mendoza & Tomas Esson / Pablo Cano Musical Marionettes Irreversible Special Project 2009. ©Copyright 2010 IRREVERSIBLE an International Art Project Published by Irreversible Magazine, Inc. 1508 Bay Road # N115, Miami Beach, FL 33139 / All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. IRREVERSIBLE an International Art Project is protected through trademark registration in the United States.

South Africa Lives & works in Chicago, Illinois, USA

lorna MARSH Alien, Mixed Media on Paper, Diptych, 29”x82”, 2010 www.lornamarsh.com

pablo CANO 30 years

For over 30 years artist Pablo Cano has dazzled and delighted children and adults alike with the wondrous marionettes he constructs from found objects and performs in front of an eager audience. Broken lampshades, ornate chair backs, pine cones, birdcages, wooden crates, and shiny silver cigarette foils are combined to miraculously give shape to figures so convincing that spectators initially do not spot the common materials that give these marionettes their form. Is that a gaggle of geese circling above? No they are sculptures made of square tissue boxes and plastic spray bottles linked together on a large metal loop. The lusty Busty Galore with her enormous inflated balloons, discrete tassels and rounded tin can bottom actually makes audiences blush, while children weep when a wooden soldier made is wounded.

The Witch, MOCA marionette production CAVALETTI’S DREAM 1998 Media: cloth, black paten leather baby shoes, wood, wire, white terracotta, glass eye, black doll wig, gas can, string, blue doll eye, red nail polish, safety pins, glue Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Wayner.

Few artists can so convincingly transform inert material or provide a transcendent experience. Pablo’s Little Havana studio is filled with objects that he finds or are given to him by friends that he organizes by category, texture and material.There is a box filled to the brim with dolls’ eyes and another with cigarette foils.There are floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with broken clocks, broken kitchen appliances and utensils, porcelain and plastic dishes, fragments of chairs and tables, lamp shades and other odds-and-ends. He carefully selects each element according to the personality of the

Artist studio

Photo courtesy of Jose Rodriguez

Pablo Cano’s Musical marionettes,” Hermes of Paris, New York, NY 2006

Photo courtesy of Wendy Dosher Smith

character and makes them come to life in the annual productions he has been creating for the Museum of Contemporary, North Miami, since 1998. All of these productions are based on Cano’s own worldview in which beauty, knowledge, kindness and, most of all, art triumph.

The stories are written by Cano’s friends or family. Over the years, the productions have become more elaborate and complex. In order to provide the marionettes with greater variety of animation he began collaborating with choreographers, initially with Karen Peterson and more recently with Katherine Kramer. The early marionettes were limited to moving their heads and flapping the hands and legs whereas the more recent characters demonstrate a full range of movement, most notably the amazing break dancing orangutans in The Beginning. Music has always played an important role in these productions whether recordings from his vast collection of records from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the live classical piano performance by Karen Schwartz of Claude Debussy’s The Toy Box, or the raucous jazz improvisational band that plays along with the marionettes in a number of productions. The amazing MOCA staff provides resources, technical support, construction of the stage and sets, and even the voice overs for the marionettes, when needed.

Pablo Cano’s Musical marionettes,” Hermes of Paris, New York, NY 2006

Preliminary sketch for Cavaletti’s Dream, 1998 revived 2009, ink on paper. Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL

St. Barbara on horse back, 1984-85, Marionette, mixed media.

Cano succeeds in these transformations because these marionettes are the incarnation of his own reality. Although he was born in Havana, Cuba, he left his homeland with his family when he was one year old in 1962 on the last flight out of Cuba before the Cuban Missile Crisis. His imagination, however, was enriched by the tales his family would tell of Cuba, which grew in his mind to epic proportions.

The underlying sentiment of the stories was the realization that this world was forever lost, even if they were to return to Cuba today. He grew up in a family of artists and musicians so it was natural for him to combine art and performance in his work. His musician father, Pablo Cano, Sr., is a musician who assists his son with the selection of music to accompany his performances and his sister Isabel contributes her sewing skills to fashioning some of the costumes. Cano’s mother, Margarita, is a self taught artist who creates surreal paintings and drawings of the Cuban landscape from memory and illuminates folios of aphorisms like Medieval Books of Hours. As early as the age of six, Cano emulated his mother’s paintings and subject matter. Margarita inspired her son to pursue his art of fantasy.

She also wrote a story about a young boy who hangs his own art work on the wall of a museum that she would read to Cano when he was a child. This story became the source for Cano’s most experimental work to-date The Blue Ribbon.

Despite the fairytale appearance of some of these productions, they are sophisticated art happenings that are created by a very knowledgeable and informed artist. Cano majored in art at Miami Dade College, earned his bachelors in Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and received his Master of Fine Arts at Queens College, New York in 1985. Informed by Dada theater, with its assault on logic and reliance on chance, and by Cubist bricolage, and performance art Cano created his first marionette production Animated Altarpieces as his Master of Fine Arts project. Cano’s productions are always filled with surprises that startle the audience. In Cavaletti’s dream, Pegasus descends from the sky above the audience on a flying horse made from an umbrella frame, in To Sin or Not

“To sin or noT To sin,”

Marionette production 2001, Museum of Contemporary Art , North Miami, FL.

Left to Right: Patience Rod Puppet, Faith Rod Puppet.

Mixed media, lamp shade, wood metal, ceramic, hair , gold cigarette foil paper “To Sin Or Not To Sin” marionette production 2001.

Museum of Contemporary Art , North Miami, FL

Princess Havana & Hypnotist marionette: Dr. Death Preliminary sketch for Once Upon an in Island marionette production 1999.

Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL

To Sin, the vice Gluttony’s stomach balloons in until it bursts, and The Beginning began with a big bang—a cacophony of metal pans dropped all at once from above . Mayhem ensues and the marionettes breakdown the fourth wall of theater by intruding into the audience.This was most evident in his 2008 production The Blue Ribbon in which the audience sat at large round tables where they could draw during the production while the actors manipulating the marionettes based on art classical and modern masterpieces, dashed from one end of the room to the other, singing and dancing at each table, occasionally colliding and adding to the thrill of this unique art happening.At the finale of each performance, Ring Master Cano would select the best drawing by a child and award the coveted blue ribbon.

All children (and adults) were winners though, as all the drawings were hung on the museum’s walls as part of Cano’s installation for the duration of the exhibition.

It takes Cano one year (or as he tells his young audience 365 days) to create the marionettes for a new production. Ideas start as drawings on the paper placemats at Versailles restaurant in Little Havana and are given shape in his studio. At present he is developing marionettes for The Seven Wonders of the Modern World, written by Carmen Pelaez and choreography by Katherine Kramer that will premiere at MOCA in the Spring of 2011. As we eagerly await the birth of these new marionettes we can marvel at the endless creativity of Pablo Cano, who can certainly be classified as one of our Modern Wonders!

Bonnie Clearwater © Copyright Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL

Photo courtesy of Stephen Savage

Upcoming artist exhibiton: One person show at the Kelley Roy Gallery scheduled to open in March 2011. 50 NE 29th St. Wynwood Art District Miami, Florida 33137

Irreversible Magazine would like to give a special thanks to the following: Bonnie Clearwater Executive Director & Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL., Stephen Savage: www.savagepictures.com. & John and Laurene “The Oramas Family�.

Photo courtesy Mariano Costa-Peuser

“Viva Cuba Libre”, 2008 Installation Fiberglass, wood and fabric, 36” x 180” x 42”

Cuba Lives & works in Miami, FL USA

alejandro MENDOZA “My environments are constants on my aesthetic proposal, which is tied to the parallel need to understand common sense and making my interpretation of it more or less acceptable or understandable. Creating is the experience of being constantly unsatisfied.When this happens, I should redo and lie to myself again�. www.alejandromendoza.net Exhibition: Past is History, Future is Mystery Rafael Lopez-Ramos Curator Miami Dade College Art Gallery System Freedom Tower Miami, FL USA

Photo Courtesy of Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts. Cecilia Paredes, Both Worlds, 2009. Acid Free Photograph Print.

a neW arT fair ModeL for The 21sT CenTurY MIA INAUGURATES AN INTRIGUING AND UNIQUE NEW MODEL THIS YEAR COMBINING A HIGHLY SELECTIVE ART FAIR WITH A STRONG, CENTRAL CURATORIAL VISION, ALONG WITH INDEPENDENTLY CURATED PROJECTS.

Improvising Architectures

2011 MIA Highlights

MIA 2011 is inaugurating a unique new model for the Miami art community, combining carefully selected contemporary and cutting edge galleries with a strong curatorial program aimed at supporting the Miami art community.

The fair will host 65 prestigious international dealers, exhibiting contemporary art, including photography, works on paper, sculpture, installations, art project rooms, and new media from emerging and established artists. “My commitment to the Miami International Art Fair – MIA will be the application of my many years of experience in order to make MIA a unique, contemporary platform for the world of collecting and exhibiting art,” said Aldo Castillo. Other special exhibitions at MIA

MIA Presents “IMPROVISING ARCHITECTURES” a curated exhibition by Gean Moreno.

“I’m excited to participate in a fair that is so invested in the City. And, we can even say, that it is invested in the right way – by juxtaposing Miami artists and dealers with their international counterparts in order to engage in broader dialogues.The main goal for Miami’s present cultural development should be to draw links with the outside.” Gean Moreno said. His curated exhibition “Improvising Architectures” will look at the meaning of proliferating precarious structures in our globalized world. It will showcase the work of five Miami artists--Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Nicolas Lobo, Ernesto Oroza and Viking Funeral--along side that of artists Graham Hudson of London, Felipe Arturo of Bogotá, and Heather Rowe and Carlos Sandoval de León, of New York.

Graham Hudson, The Ruins, 2009. Steel, timber, lighting, turntables and LP’s. 18m x 7m x 4m

The result of two weeks accumulation of industrial materials and stratification result in this large fragile installation made of scaffold, pallets, ladders, strip-lights and a series of turntables that flash into life for one second at a time, creating a new and ever changing score. The work is a fusion of architecture and theatre, equally a sculpture and a sound work, a bridge between the landscape of the environment and that of the psyche.

InstAllAtIons & Art proJects 2011 MIA Highlights

will include, “Lotus in Motion”, by conceptual artist Gordon Halloran.

“Lotus in Motion” is a series of floating paintings that represent in a simple and abstract form, the lily pad of a lotus flower. Each floating painting will be uniquely formed and painted to work in harmony as they are set afloat in an ever changing montage of overlapping color and transparency assisted by audience activated movement.

Additionally MIA will present a specially commissioned wall of floating steel curtains by Colombia’s Claudia Hakim, a renowned fiber artist currently working on creating art from automobile parts. In addition, MIA will gather important women within the international art industry, including Brazil’s Maria Bonomi, South Africa’s Lorna Marsh and Korea’s Hyung Joo Kim.

Conceptual artist Gordon Halloran will present “Lotus in Motion”, a series of floating paintings that represent in a simple and abstract form, the lily pad of a lotus flower.

Emmanuel Fremin Gallery Is an avant-garde gallery located in New York City, that mainly represents emerging artists working in multiple media including: photography, video, and installation . Emmanuel Fremin is a non conformist gallery that embraces the progressive conceptualization of the artists they represent through serene, spiritual or provocative works.

Emmanuel Fremin Gallery. Kilu, Rays, Installation

2011 MIA Highlights

MIA presents, the Arts of Distinction Award to Diana Lowenstein of Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts for her outstanding contribution to the Miami art community.

Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts Diana Lowenstein has been a respected figure in the international art scene for over twenty one years. Through her role as an active gallery owner and director she has continued to promote young emerging artists, both local and international, thereby contributing to the art world’s ongoing demand for the next generation of stars. She has also participated in numerous fair organizing committees, influencing their orientation to include a quality Latin American mix of talent.

“Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts is the perfect selection to be the inaugural recipient of the Arts of Distinction Award.

She represents one of the top models in contemporary art, her reputation and art aesthetics are impeccable, I am so happy that MIA is honoring Lowenstein”.

Commented Aldo Castillo, Associate Director of MIA. Located in the Wynwood Art District in Miami in a converted warehouse space at 2043 North Miami Avenue, Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts presently represents over thirty artists from across the globe.

The gallery has participated in high caliber art fairs around the world such as FIAC in Paris, ARCO in Madrid, Art Basel in Switzerland, as well as Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Chicago in the United States.

Black Square Gallery. Anton Solomoukha, Little Red Ridinghood Visits Chernobyl.

Gym. Basketball hall. Bacchanale.Tizian. Photograph.

Black Square Gallery Founded by Anna Milashevych and Ronald Kritzler in 2010, Black Square Gallery exhibits all mediums from paintings and sculptures to video art and photography; representing accomplished artists as well as talented and promising young artists from around the world.

Mindy Solomon Gallery. Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Mitosis. Blown glass, mixed media. 2007

Mindy Solomon Gallery Located in the heart of the cultural and entertainment district of downtown St. Petersburg, Florida; Mindy Solomon Gallery organizes sophisticated exhibitions with emphasis on contemporary photography and ceramic sculpture.

Mindy Solomon Gallery’s unique new program is unlike any other in the area and is attracting the attention of the art world.

Kavachnina Contemporary. Sergio Garcia, Flower - Man III, Mixed media on canvas, 84” x 108”. 2010

Kavachnina Contemporary Located in the Miami Wynwood Art District, specializes in emerging, mid-career artists both local and foreign in various media.

2011 MIA Highlights

Zadok Art Gallery Rachel Henriot DNA skull

Zadok Located in the heart of the Wynwood District holds art dating from Post-War to Contemporary from emerging and established artists.

Mother Art: Women Artists of the World MIA 2011 recognizes and celebrates the significant contribution women artists have made to the art world. MIA will showcase the work of recognized international women artists through “Mother Art:Women Artists of the World”: Lorna Marsh (South Africa) Maria Bonomi (Brazil) Claudia Hakim (Colombia) & Hyung Joo Kim (Korea)

An interactive installation specially commissioned for the Fair by Colombia’s Claudia Hakim, renown fiber artist currently working on creating art from industrial parts. Hakim will be represented at MIA by Etra Fine Art Gallery.

Hyung Joo Kim, Harmony of the Vestiges, Korean paper from Mulberry, Ink stick and Oriental Dyes. 82” x 47” (210cm x 119.38cm) This piece was inspired by my son. We enter the world as pure beings. Neither our hearts nor our minds are filled with malevolent thoughts. As we age, we become tainted, and in death, we are no longer the pure white beings we once were. However, all hope is not lost. While we gain experience with age and become more exposed to the world, we can still hold on to the purity we had since birth. By holding on to the innocence, we can leave the world as we had started.

Lorna Marsh, Portrait of a woman, mixed media on paper. 40” x 26”, 2010

Mother Art: Women Artists of the World

Maria Bonomi, Hydra V/D, woodcut on Japanese paper. 170x170, 2000

Fair Hours January 14 – 17, 2011 from12-7pm until 9pm on the 14th Preview January 13 6:30-7:30pm First View Cocktail Reception. (by separate ticket) 7:30-10pm Collectors’ Invitational Location Miami Beach Convention Center Hall D 1901 Convention Center Dr. Miami Beach, FL 33139 Admission One day pass: $10 in advance, $15 at the door Multi-day pass: $15 in advance, $20 at the door Children under 12 accompanied by adult, free

ricardo PAU-LLOSA Parallel Currents: Highlights from the Ricardo Pau-Llosa Collection of Latin American Art, Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

Famine

The native asks: This Egypt, must I love it famished as when it golden stood?

Belonging is a reflex.

The exile says: Egypt full, a perfumed tide.

Empty, she is my child. Sand mocks grain only when there is no bread When the granary’s full, the two musics rhyme, their glass songs sharpen the sun.

I came upon de land as a child yet sire enough of need to know the difference between journey and flight. And I cam to love Egypt, knowing beaten soil and the deaf whip.

The man now from what was cannot tell you wha he loves more the sand, the grain, the obelisks caught in dabs of onyx and silver on the Nile’s impatient flow, or that Egypt fed as it hungered.

Poem Extract - Parable Hunter, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008

(b. May 17, 1954, Havana, Cuba, has lived in the United States since December 1960). A Cuban-American poet, pioneer art critic of Latin American art in the US and Europe, and author of short fiction.

Interview with Ricardo Pau-Llosa Norelkys Blazekovic, November 2, 2010 From August 29 to November 14 of this year, the University of Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art displayed a unique exhibition, over 50 works in the collection of Miami-based poet and art critic Ricardo Pau-Llosa. Parallel Currents: Highlights of the Ricardo Pau-Llosa Collection of Latin American Art included works by masters, established mid-career artists, and emerging artists, among these: Jesús Soto, Olga de Amaral, Tulio Romano, Rafael Coronel, Humberto Castro, Rogelio Polesello, Nicolás Leiva,Agustín Fernández,Wilson Bigaud, Fabio Herrera, Homero Hidalgo, Arnaldo Roche Rabell, Mario Maffioli, Adonay Duque, Julio Rosado del Valle, Marta Minujín, Ana Albertina Delgado, Harry Abend, Enrique Castro-Cid,Antonio Henrique Amaral-a cross-section of nations, generations, and styles. The exhibition explored different aesthetic trends which, according to Pau-Llosa, form the backbone of Modernist Latin American “visual thinking”-a term he uses often. The Infinite, Oneiric, and Theatrical are seen as fundamental structures of thought that set Latin American art apart from the European and North American expressions of Modernism. But the parallels don’t stop there. Pau-Llosa’s essay in the book-length catalogue accompanying the exhibition also discloses how poetry and art shaped his life, and how Cuba, Latin America, and the United States also operated as simultaneous and sometimes not-so-parallel-but conflicting and intersecting-forces in his life and work.

Norelkys (Noor) Blazekovic:What do you think Parallel Currents achieved and why did it come about, at the University of Notre Dame, of all places?

Ricardo Pau-Llosa: Clearly there is a lot of interest, at Notre Dame and throughout the political and academic world, in the growing cultural and demographic importance of latinos, so exhibitions like Parallel Currents fit into this. Some years ago, for example, Notre Dame launched an Institute of Latino Studies.

However, specifically as concerns Parallel Currents, what started out at first as a more general interest in modern and contemporary Latin American art, evolved quickly into a much more complex project that also dealt with my work and my career as a poet and critic. I have been writing about Latin American art for 36 years, as long as I have been writing and publishing poetry. So, Parallel Currents became a multidimensional project; for the Snite Museum director and his staff, this was the guiding point of the project. Charles Loving, the director of the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame, and members of his team-Robert Sedlack, the designer of the catalogue, and Eric Nisly, photographer and digital archivist-spent several days at the house taking nearly a thousand pictures of how I live with my paintings and sculptures and my tribal and folk artifacts.

They were very interested in the totality of the space and how to document the way I live in the book that accompanies the exhibition.

... Pau Llosa has created an original model of art criticism that establishes that Latin American art is distinct from Parallel currents in Europe and the United States because of the high presence of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche in its images...

For over three decades, Pau-Llosa has been a seminal figure in elevating the discussion of modern Latin American art on the internation al level, from a mapping of how styles originating in Europe or the United States took off in the region to an appreciation of Latin American contributions to the evolution of modern art...

Charles R. Loving Director and Curator, George Rickey Sculpture Archive, from his exhibition catalog introduction.

NB: Why was it important to project this “multidimensionality” in itself; wasn’t it already known that you publish poems and art criticism?

RPLl: One gets so used to being understood by others as a member of a category or group, that we are surprised by a multidimensional portrait of anyone, let alone of oneself. We are routinely put into boxes, and these are defined by politics, gender, generation, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and in the case of writers and artists, also by trade, craft, or style. We live in a tangled web of crossreferences, and we begin, unwittingly, to see ourselves in that way, too.

Take the political angle in my life, as one example. When I give talks or readings, I entertain questions from the audience afterward, and invariably, no matter what the subject of the talk or reading was, no matter if it had nothing to do with Cuba, I’ll get questions mostly about Cuba, what my thoughts are about this or that current issue or crisis, etc. This is an example of how the boxes work. I am not particularly bothered by this, and I am happy to give my political opinions if I am asked to do so, but the point is that for many people, the mere fact of one’s country of origin defines the way they see you. It’s the box they put you in that has to be confirmed, in their minds, before they can take in anything else you are trying to communicate.

NB: So Parallel Currents was, for you, like seeing yourself in a mirror for the first time, your entire life compiled in one book?

RPLl: Yes, but I was also able to throw light on Miami, or aspects of its recent cultural history, that many people ignore. We tend to think of Art Basel as the beginning of the South Florida Art Scene. In fact, there was a very interesting Cuban and Latin American cultural reality in Miami, starting in the 1960’s, peaking in the 80’s, and lasting until the early 90’s. It was unnecessarily, and no doubt unwittingly, weakened by Art Basel. But the media loves big events, things they can focus on and rave about, and the gradually deepening emergence of a distinct cultural scene is not what the media is designed to focus on; too slow, too complex and nuanced a subject. So, in my Parallel Currents essay, I talk about the early Cuban exile art scene in the 70’s and how it evolved into a Pan-Latin American reality, and how unique and truly cosmopolitan that was.

NB:Whose responsibility is it to keep these movements, if that was what the Latin American art scene in Miami was, alive and in the public eye-the collectors, the media?

RPLl: It wasn’t a movement, as such, but a cultural mission which Miami walked away from. The problem is that collectors also act in a very predictable manner, following trends even as they claim otherwise, and, in Miami at least, they have tended to be people who arrive in the art world with either a desire to satisfy their vanity to project themselves as important people, or they are speculators and investors-neither type has a great deal of genuine cultural interest. I don’t have a problem with people who invest in art, resell it, and so forth. What would artists live from otherwise? The problem is that what was once a natural focus on Latin America in this city, because of its history, demographics, and geography, was transformed into a generic global scene very much like what you will find in metropolises like New York or Los Angeles, except that even in these you will find thriving undercurrents of regionally specific art scenes, and which even provide cross-over’s from time to time, something which Miami has not nurtured.

Miami embodies the mistaken and immature assumption that regional or local equals limited and backward, whereas in reality there can be no truly universal art that is not rooted in specific traditions and the places that made them possible. This is what real urban centers and their press and museums understand.

Miami never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. This place was dealt a wonderful set of cards, but those who called the shots in the institutions here did not want to play those cards because they felt very insecure about being different and out of step with their model cities. It’s a case of arrested adolescence on a collective scale. One of the things I am very proud of is that in my career as a critic and curator, which I’ve conducted completely alone and with no institutional backing of any kind, I did not wait for curators and critics in New York, say, to bless an artist’s work as worthy before I wrote about it. I wrote enthusiastically about artists whose work I admired, whether anyone else had paid them any attention or not. That was certainly not how the small-minded critics at the Miami Herald and other local organs of the press have operated, and continue to do so.

NB:What other aspects of this exhibition presented a distinct challenge for you?

RPLl: Parallel Currents marks a watershed in my career and my life, to be sure. It also challenged me to synthesize and explain the critical model I had been applying to the work of different artists, mostly from Latin America but also artists from the United States and Europe, for over thirty years. At the same time, the exhibition and the essay I wrote for the book impelled me to grapple with complex memories-some of them very poignant-about exile, my family’s struggles, and their unbroken support for me and what must have seemed to them, as working class exiles trying to make ends meet, a rather eccentric choice of vocation on my part: poetry and art criticism.

Photos by Museum Photographer and Digital Archivist Eric Nisly I dedicate this exhibition to my parents, Ricardo Pau (1925- 1991) and Maria Llosa (b.

1930). my grandmother Regina Garcia (1905- 2005); and my syster, Maria Regina Pau (b. 1950). For their unflagging support and love, their unfailing examples in courage, and their embrace of my passion for art and poetry when all the conditions of life would have pardoned a lesser guardianship.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa closing dedicatory catalog.

As for the critical model I generated, it focuses on how different tropes-figures of speech which operate at a pre-linguistic level of perception and cognition, among them metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche-were employed by Latin American artists to expand, rather than reduce, the power of representation in their work. Modernism in Latin America embraced representation while in the United States and Europe, it shunned representation, extolling abstraction, the immediacy of the medium, and later the ephemeral and the conceptual nature of art. Representation drew from deeply ingrained attitudes in Latin America’s liturgical visual culture-think of Catholicism and the indigenous and West African cosmologies and religions it fused with. By studying how different tropes enabled artists to focus on the Infinite, for example-a philosophical concept which only an art that embraced representation could entertain and comment on-or the Oneiric, understood as something more complex than the “fantastic” and the dream-state, I could say something a little more interesting about Latin American Modernists than the fact they were into strange dream images. I was intrigued by how many artists engaged narrative in their work, starting with Mexico’s muralistas in the 30’s and 40’s. This tendency, which I study as the Theatrical current in the region’s art, is dominated by metonymy, as the Infinite is ruled by synecdoche, and the Oneiric is driven by metaphor. The point was to explain in original terms what made Latin American art a distinct part of international Modernism-in other words, what made it different and original yet indispensable to understanding the movement in its totality.

But the biggest challenge was how to connect all the dots. My poems have often explicitly taken tropes as their theme, and art has educated to see things and reflect upon what I see in painterly and sculptural terms. I also had to engage the fact that collecting art and living submerged in art functioned as a surrogate homeland for me. I had indeed yearned to belong to a collectivity, but it was obvious that returning to a Cuba that had been turned from a politically flawed but culturally vibrant modern culture into a feudal and semi-savage state owned and run by criminals calling themselves socialists, wasn’t going to be possible. America is my adopted homeland, but as I was growing up in Tampa and Chicago in the 60’s, keeping my old cultural allegiances as I was assimilating to my new country was not looked upon kindly. My family and I moved to Miami in 1968, when I was 14. Living here ever since, I have often run afoul of Miami’s philistine Cuban community which cares very little about its culture or its preservation and projection. I got to know most of Latin America pretty well, but I didn’t find myself entirely at home there, either. So I constructed a cocoon of sorts, turning poems, essays, and collected artworks into a private ecology of the imagination. I had to try to explain all this to myself first-that was the hard partand then to others.

Pau-Llosa is the curator of Miami’s first Sculpture Biennial, produced by Gary Nader Fine Art, December 1, 2010-January 31, 2011, in downtown Miami.

The book, Parallel Currents: Highlights of the Ricardo Pau-Llosa Collection of Latin American Art can be viewed, free, as a pdf. file at: http://www.nd.edu/~sniteart/publications/images/Parallel_Currents_Ricardo_Pau-llosa_Collection.pdf

Cuba Lives & works in Miami, Florida USA

tomas ESSON EL BICHO

Colorao, oil on Canvas. 85 x 68 in. 2003

Elegante, Oil on Canvas. 72 x 121 in. 1993

Mythology and Coarseness For the past few years the Provincial Museum of Villa Clara has been organizing great young artists’ exhibitions. Their latest accomplishment is the first solo exhibition of Tomas Esson (Marianao, Cuba, 1963), an artist whom at the age of 20 found a language of his own that is strong, expressive and absolutely original. There are many artists whom have never accomplished this.The painting of Esson develops in the best tradition of the grotesque, one which is both shocking and yet part of a popular discourse, one created by Rabelais, Quevedo, Goya and Clemente.

This motif of the grotesque has had very notable followers from the “Bufo Theatre”, such as Meza, Virgilio Piñera, from Rafael Blanco to Posada and has been revitalized by young creators like Tonel and Adriano Buergo.

The grotesque, almost always moralist at its core, tends to steer social satire and customs. One of the original characteristics of the work of Esson is that its grotesqueness, without leaving satire, reaches a mythological dimension, with a high level of generalization.The personages are neighborhood thugs and at the same time gods. These beings are paradoxical not only because they are revealed to be majestic and of lowly rank, but also solemn and gross, magnificent and obscene. They transcend all through their flexibility in character to embody mythological abstraction and the raw coarseness of everyday life. It is truly unique. Perhaps the work’s originality is more evident if we think, for example, of the depiction of Lam with a cigar placed of half a side in the mouth. It is a difficult union of the grotesque and the crude along with a sublime mythological imagination.This presents message of his work which, on the one hand criticizes attitudes and conducts, and on the other presents an overwhelming mystery. Its entities seem to live in a mythological time that is highly original and yet also an undesirable contemporary state.

Esson has created this new age with the same spontaneity of the primitive when they invented their first gods and demons. They sprouted simply as if from a void, without conceptualizations, influences or the alchemy of a laboratory. It is impossible to track a line of family heritage in concept: we are before an iconography of unique seal, born of the candor of the artists. Upon speaking with the artist, we realize that his interests are truly technical, forged inside a traditional approach to the painting. Strangely the ideas that led to the works are above all often very simple, in contrast with the complexity of the results.

If, in a general way, these works could be situated inside the expressionism of the postmodern era, it is for an inclination of the epoch or because Esson been nourished of Goya, Van Gogh and Siqueiros- “old” painting -, not by being added to a tendency that he does not know.

Perhaps his most important creative genes come from the comics; more than the use of certain formal resources in the fantasy which delivers the birth of his monsters. One of the most disturbing characteristics of its Esson’s figuration is that does not present humans with horns or heads of animal, like Zarza, neither bulls humanized, as Picasso, but hominids of another species, gentlemen of some planet or from a fabulous era.

Without any doubt Esson is one of the most original Cuban artists at work today. I hope that the same ease of creation which guided him will not escape him. His work might be seen as threatened to slip towards the caricature and the Costumbrismo*.

We trust in the intuition of this notable protagonist of the environment of creativity that percolates around the artists of the ISA and San Alejandro, Cuba. They contribute definitively to young contemporary Plastic Arts becoming one of most energetic movements of modern Cuban culture.

Cuban Magazine: “REVOLUCION Y CULTURA”, September 1986, Gerardo Mosquera

Translated into English November, 2010 by Ana Maria Sarlat & Norelkys Blazekovic *Costumbrismo (sometimes anglicized as Costumbrism) refers to the literary or pictorial interpretation of local everyday life, mannerisms, and customs, primarily in the Hispanic scene, and particularly in the 19th century. Costumbrismo is related both to artistic realism and to Romanticism, sharing the Romantic interest in expression as against simple representation and the romantic and realist focus on precise representation of particular times and places, rather than of humanity in the abstract. [1][2] It is often satiric and even moralizing, but unlike proper realism does not usually offer any particular analysis of the society it depicts. When not satiric, its approach to quaint folkloric detail often has a romanticizing aspect.

1. José Escobar, Costumbrismo entre Romanticismo y Realismo, Bibioteca Virtual Miguel Cervantes.

2. a b c d e f Antonio Reina Palazón, El Costumbrismo en la Pintura Sevillana del Siglo XIX, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel Cervantes.

Retrato No. 6, Oil on Linen. 68 x 68 in. 1995

Rebolico, Oil on Canvas. 68 x 86.5 in. 2000

Retrato No. 22, Oil on Linen. 69 x 72 in. 1997

Retrato No. 23, Oil on Linen. 72 x 72 in. 1997

Tomas Esson TALISMAN STATEMENT “TALISMAN will be of flesh and bone one day copulating with TALIS, swimming and flying among us like flies” On my fifteenth birthday, my Father Coswell Thomas Esson Sharpe gave me the first watch he bought for himself, a gold 1952 Cuban brand, named Ultramar made in Switzerland. On that occasion my Father also showed me something previously unknown to me. He pulled a hand stitched red cloth bag from his pocket with something hidden inside of it. When I reached to touch the bag, he stopped me, “Son, this is extremely private; this is my ‘Resguardo’ a personal protective amulet, and if you touch it will lose its power.” He put away the bag in his pocket and continued, “Son you should have your own ‘Resguardo’ someday.” From that moment on, I have created my own personal amulet and named it TALISMAN. The happiness of inheriting my Father’s gold watch and wearing it every day since then, combined with the impact of my Father’s warnings of not touching his ‘Resguardo,’ marked the beginning of many transformations in my life, as well as the catalytic inspirations of the TALISMAN PROJECT: The creation and development of my very own protective amulet. From that moment with my Father and the accumulated experiences of all those years is a part of God’s Will, using me as the visual artist to present TALISMAN to the world.

Being an interdisciplinary artist, I wanted to create my TALISMAN different from my Father’s, starting a new tradition. In addition, to having a TALISMAN in my pocket at all times, I also wanted to give it away to family members, friends and special people that I would meet around the world. Since then I have accomplished my mission, for I have sculpted and continue giving away hundreds of TALISMAN Sculptures.

Making the TALISMAN Sculptures in Cuba required some ingenuity: I used a mixture of water and a white powder called “Blanco de España”, to which I added glue made from rabbit skin, (also known as Carpenter’s glue) and linseed oil, resulting in a medium that I shape, model and sculpt with my hands. I have been sculpting each TALISMAN individually without the use of any tools. After sculpting them in batches of ten, I would set them to dry under the Sun for an entire day and later painting each one separately by hand in red and black. Because the TALISMAN Sculptures are hand made, you can clearly see my fingerprints embedded in the medium at plain sight.

After arriving in the United States in 1990, I faced a new challenge: How would I replace my Cuban medium with an American one? In Miami I found an industrial pre-mixed paste that I could sculpt into my TALISMAN and later bake in the oven for twenty minutes. This pre-mixed paste had similar consistency to the one I used in Cuba; it was prone to breaking under excessive handling and was not water resistant.

While living in New York City, between the years 1994 and 2000, I experimented with various types of industrial pre-mixed mediums, until I found one that was water resistant and also came in a variety of colors.

This allowed me to eliminate the process of hand painting the TALISMAN Sculptures for the very first time.

In 1998 I found an even better pre-mixed medium that, aside from coming in a variety of colors and being water resistant it remains flexible after being baked.

This is the medium I now use.

In July of year 2000 my Father traveled out of Cuba for the first time, to visit me in my studio in New York City. He enjoyed watching me paint, create drawings, work on my photography and sculpt TALISMAN. Aside from watching baseball games on television everyday, we had the fortune of attending a live game at Yankee Stadium.

We had an unforgettable wonderful time together and I will always treasure the memories of the three months he spent with me in America.

On one occasion when I was working on a new batch of ten TALISMAN Sculptures, he revealed the mystery hidden in the contents inside the hand stitched red cloth bag that he always keeps in his pocket. He told me: “The fundamental content, among other secret things, were TRABAJOS* - ‘Works’ made with black pepper seeds”. This latter revelation, has given me the wisdom to include three Medicine Seeds inside each of TALISMAN Sculptures.

Tomás Esson 2008. www.tomasesson.com

*In the tradition of “Santeria” the African Yoruba Religion brought to Cuba by the Atlantic Slave Trade, “TRABAJOS” refers to Magical craft works created for the purpose of Protection, Good Luck, Healing, and the granting of personal wishes.

Talisman Mahogany, Sculptures, Series of Four. 2008

Peru Lives & works in New York City, USA

The Pearl, 2008, oil on canvas, 11 x 14 inches

“My works are narratives about defilement and psychological damage. Figures are mutilated, defective, confrontational, perversely hyper-sexualized, and tormented by an unattainable need for connection. Moments of crisis arise upon the realization of the human capacity for violence and the discovery of evil that hides behind normality. Presenting a space in which to ruminate on this dark side of human nature poses the question of how to retain integrity and dignity in the face of trauma�.

catherine TAFUR falling in love with the wounded

As an artist, Catherine Tafur approaches her work with great earnestness, but this is not the only reason that we find such a fresh vitality in her art. Another factor is in actions related to the consciousness of the other.

We are reminded that for an artist, the act of making art is an act of introspection. It is the task of dusting, scrubbing stains and clearing away garbage.

She finds greater meaning in the laborious work itself. The status ascribed to the human body is culturally determined. In a capitalist society, the body itself along with the social activities and mental symbols that use the body occupy the same status as private property.

Catherine’s work is antithetical to the entertainment culture of contemporary society where corporeal pleasures abound, and her projects are all the more persuasive in the context of our modern age where, in the process of modernization, the value of labor has been lost and similar values broken down.

1

3

2

4

5

6

1.- The Ganesh Experiment: Andy’s Heart, 2009, colored pencil on paper, 9 x 12 inches 2.- Bitch, 2009, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches 3.- Insides, 2008, pencil on paper, 11 x 14 inches 4.- Untitled, 2009, pencil, india ink, acrylic medium, nails, screws, washers on paper on board,18 x 24 x 3 inches 5.- In Search of Martyrdom, 2009, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 21 x 30 inches 6.- I love you too, Baby, 2006, oil on canvas, 36 x 44 inches 7.- Three Stages for Becoming a Woman (detail of center canvas), 2008, oil on canvas, 60 x 36 inches

Catherine Tafur’s art reaches directly from her heart to that part of our brain tasked with the complicated job of protecting our hearts from falling in love with the wounded.

Her delicately precise realism, with its attention to minute and fine detail (especially in her drawings contrasts her vision of vivid and horrifying heteroplasties; physically altered, psychically maimed. Yet she expresses such profound tenderness and vulnerability we grudgingly and reluctantly are seduced into caring. It is empathy that she seeks from us for characters who struggle so terribly with the misery of cross currents.

The nightmarish images of her child androgynes stare out at us without blinking. They make us feel initially as if we were the cause of their tormented and hellish existence. But they are not blaming us.They awaken in us a profound discomfort because her work makes us aware of the irreconcilable conflict between our extraordinary capacity to love and our terror that we may not be worth loving.

What we come quickly to understand from this work is that what pulls at our hearts eventually tears open our flesh.

Eric Fischl

7

www.catherinetafur.com

I International Triennial of the Caribbean

Santo Domingo - Dominican Republic 2010 Art & Environment

Tony Capellan, Mar Caribe (detail)

The Caribbean Biennial (BC) was conceived in Santo Domingo in 1992, as a contest and an encounter dedicated especially to-dedicated mostly to- Painting in the Caribbean and in Central America, including the Greater and Lesser Antilles, Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, Guyana, Cayenne and Surinam. During the last two editions (2001-2003), the Republic hosted the so-called “transterrados�, that is, those (take out)the Caribbean artists who settled especially in Miami and New York. It is during these editions that the Biennial consolidated its prestige and organizational potential as an international platform, thus affirming its operational capacities ranging from integration to an invitation and to all contemporary plastic and visual forms.

In the context of the Declaration of the city of Santo Domingo as “American Capital of Culture 2010”, the Ministry of Culture, through the Modern Art Museum, areis- committed to the task of radically redefining the bases of the original organization, objectives, and name of the Biennial which, as from this invitation, will move towards new concrete horizons such as the International Triennial of the Caribbean (TRIC 2010) as well as other open and alternative spaces of the Dominican capital, from the 1st of September to the 24th of October 2010.

The I International Caribbean Triennial wishes to be a privileged platform for the empowerment of contemporary artists from the Caribbean and from Central America: as a new challenge towards a multicultural, edifying, encouraging reflections, poetic, transparent, festive, proposing, fraternal and imposing - from and through imagination, sensitivity and creativity.Allowing freedom of materials, ideas and resources, the TRIC/2010 especially targeted artists whose proposals will share the fact of intense questioning concerning the many elements which make up the complex identities and contemporary social realities as well as an essential concern about the disastrous effects that result from the staggering degradation some human groups inflict on biodiversity, often through systems of exploitation, “development” and consumption of non renewable natural resources.

María Elena Ditrén Executive Director and Director of the Triennial of the Museum of Modern Art, Dominican Republic.

Charles Juhasz Alvarado ….De alas iguales Año: 2010

José Bedia El Baka 2010

Pepón Osorio The twines Año: 1998

Iván Puig Crecimientos Artificiales Año: 2008/2009

Rablaci Metáforas del Hombre contemporáneo Año: 2009

Special Guest Artist: Tony Capellan (Dominican Republic), Maria Fernanda Cardoso (Colombia), Luis Cruz Azaceta (Cuba), Phillipe Dodard (Haiti), Tirzo Martha (Curacao) and Pepon Osorio (Puerto Rico).

Special Mentions: Raul Morilla, the Dominican Republic for the installation Reincarnations Alteration, Viktor Saindily Richard Cayouette, of Guadalupe, Pressing Washing of Brain and Memory, Heleen Cornet, by Triptych The Magical Mossy Forest, Lourdes de la Riva, of Guatemala, through video Dulce Proceso,Tania Candiani, Mexico, for his video installation for Time.

Honorable Mention: A four artists whose generosity in their participation, work and career enriches this Triennial. Antonio Martorell, Edouard Duval Carrié, Jorge Pineda and Marcos Lora Read.

Pepon Osorio, Corazon

Awards: Editorial award: Charles Juhasz Alvarado, Puerto Rico, for the work of the same wings.

Showcase award: Miguelina Rivera, of the Dominican Republic, for the work “in your skin”.

Residence award: Alida Martinez in Aruba for the play Mega Bite Candy (Candy MB).

This first edition of the I International Triennial of the Caribbean was led by the Organizing Committee, consisting of María Elena Ditrén, Executive Director and Director of the Triennial of the Museum of Modern Art; Amable Lopez Melendez, Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Marianne Tolentino, Director of the National Gallery of Fine Arts, Sara Hermann, Secretary General of the Dominican Association of Art Critics (ADCA / AICA), Abil Peralta Agüero, Coordinator of the Technical Unit of Culture of the Chamber of Deputies of the Dominican Republic ; Dustin Muñoz, Assistant Director General of Fine Arts and Rafael Read, cultural representative of the National District Municipality.

tirzo MARTHA The adventures of Capitan Caribbean and his side kick knockoff

(Our superhero is fed by crispy tanned chickens of KFC Caribbean) The adventures of Captain Caribbean (also known as CC) takes place in the Caribbean and on the great continent of the former colonizers.

Captain Caribbean’s fight for the right and the exorcising of the curses of identity, history of colonialism and most of all the Afro Curse and the liberation from the contemporary forms of colonialism like tourism has become his biggest archenemies. His search for the truth takes him all the way to the big continent of the former colonizers.

Always fighting for justice in the Caribbean society has brought our hero into confrontations with the dualism in the Caribbean daily life. The so called recycled colonialism has had its toll on our superhero. What has been the behavior and way of life of the colonial rulers are now adapted and imitated by the local.The identity crisis and the increasing Afrocentrism that’s getting out of hand and is causing racial segregation in the local societies are a few of the problems our hero is confronted with.

Our hero, just like every Caribbean citizen, is being confronted with the daily shortcomings that are part of the Caribbean society and mentality.

Poverty, inferiority complex and corruption are a few of the obstacles CC has to deal with in-order to survive. On each new adventure CC has to recruit a new sidekick because of his lack of financial means to travel around with his sidekick. In some cases the situation gets that bad that he will use an inflatable doll as his sidekick.

Description Captain Caribbean and his sidekick Knockoff The typical thing about CC is his dress. Captain Caribbean wears a KFC bucket as his mask as a symbol of his wealth and fashion (like everybody eats KFC if they can afford it). His Dashiki, the wooden Rosary, his rubber gloves and his machete are the basic pieces of his costume.

His sidekick Knockoff wears mostly wigs and dark glasses because these he can steal easily. He also tend to wear fake brands of clothing and shoes.

Plot Anti Hero: Captain Caribbean Side Kick: Knock off Place: the fictional city Caribbean and the Western Continent Main archenemies: colonial past, Afro history and tourism.

Place: Fictional City Caribbean Blue sky, white sandy beaches ‘,clear’ blue Caribbean sea and a green and colorful nature. It al looks so innocent to the eye of the layperson, one perfect paradise with al the joy of life. Paradise Fatal for the people experiencing the daily rush of the fake exoticism of their, at first site, a beautiful island. Their daily existence excludes most of the time the Caribbean colors.

Initiation Captain Caribbean Because of the big respect that CC has for the former heroes of the Caribbean he will visit them to ask them, in a very polite way, for their blessing and support for his quest for justice and equality. This will be the initiation of the Captain.

The various monuments for the Caribbean Heroes (on the different islands) will be the spots for the initiating performances of CC. His first heroes will be the ones from Curacao and then the heroes from Jamaican.

Side Project The marketing strategies nowadays are also of great importance in the whole existence of our super hero.

Action figures and all kind of other marketing products are very important items in the Captain Caribbean project. These will also be presented in the different ways.

Each new action or product will be launched in a very special way.

Stay tune for our updates on our blog.

Will our hero maintain his loyalty to his principles?

Will he survive the social and political storms who take our Caribbean societies by surprise?

Curaçao Lives & works in Curaçao

Installations & Assemblages

Installation 2010 Size variable Produced for / Exhibited at: Solo exhibition at Centrum Contemporary Art Dordrecht,The Netherlands

Installations & assemblages My installations are a result of the living conditions and mentality of the people from the Caribbean.

The different cultures that give it the different turns, directions, color and shape are the basic components in my work. They’re all about the way the people behave and deal with everything surrounding them in the Caribbean societies or as immigrants in other Countries. These conditions are on their turn a result of all the different plagues that are torturing Caribbean societies. Plagues like corruption, religion, slavery history, tourism, Afro centrism and most of the entire role as victims. The Installations are a collection of objects gathered among the people from the Caribbean or other people that have one or another connection with these societies. Most of the time is the spectator involved in the installation. The visitor becomes a performer and so completes the work.

Antillia non grata

Tirzo Martha is a visual artist from Curacao. He is currently engaging in performance art throughout the Caribbean - under the theme Captain Caribbean.

Tirzo Martha - Icons, role models and politicians Over the last decade Tirzo Martha (Curaçao 1965) has been undressing the people from the Caribbean. Stripping them bare from their clothes, their jewelry, their hopes and their believes.

Sometimes even from their body fat or the features of their faces.

As an archeologist he is digging through the surface of Caribbean society, trying to reveal the secrets that are underneath and telling the simple stories of these people’s lives.

With all the materials that are surrounding mankind Tirzo Martha is trying to build an image that leaves the beholder behind with nothing but an artificially balanced stack of typical Caribbean characteristics. At first it puzzles you, as the installations and assemblages he makes somehow seem to be a combination between furniture, accessories, clothes and other household materials that are piled up in the corner of a room – maybe waiting for a cleaning lady – and altars devoted to everyday lesser gods. Then it strikes you that it has elements that do not belong in a house at all. It can be barbed wire or the steel bars we know on Curaçao from our local street bars. The whole is a balance between the things that are physically there and the many things that are left unpronounced.

Martha doesn’t want to spell it out for us; some things are better seen unsaid. And so he gives us hints that lead the beholder into the right direction. He sticks out his hand and gives us a piece of paper that says: “Your future is in your hands” or “Honest politician wanted”. Sometimes just a word or a sentence is enough, titles are an important lead in his works, on other occasions a video is installed within his installations to show us which way the wind blows. In the installation ‘Spirit of the Caribbean’ he made for the Brooklyn Museum exhibition ‘Infinite Islands’ in 2007, he filmed a priestess in Trinidad speaking to her flock, leading them into a state of trance. The aggressive tone of her voice, the pounding words that fill the room… It all leaves you with anger and sadness and wondering who the person is behind these belongings. Is this the home of the priestess or just of one of her parishioners? Again and again he tries make clear how religious believes tend to throw sand in our eyes and keep us from seeing ourselves as we are. On the other hand he deals with it, with great respect and wants to make man the center of the religion and not the gods. There is no mockery anywhere to be found, just a different sight upon piety.

“My transitory works are an existential analysis of our transitory existence in our contemporary, transitory Caribbean societies. It’s about the material fiction that coexists with the spiritual reality. The material doesn’t need to be filled with words. It is one self ’s consciousness that has to interpret it for them.”

Afro victimize video, 2009.

Site specific performed at: “Licht Aan Zee”, Kunsthall 52, Den Helder, The Netherlands & Modern Art Museum “International Triennial of the Caribbean” (TRIC 2010) Dominican Republic

It does not come as a surprise that Tirzo Martha started his career as a fashion designer. Although – as he himself sees it – fashion did not go deep enough into the matters that fascinated him, he stayed with the attributes that people desire, long for or desperately need in their life to cast out the evil eye. By showing these objects, detached from their owners, he is aiming to unmask the spirits that house them as false and fake. On the other hand he is showing us all, that it is the stories we make, that make us who we are. If we pile up our stories, the objects we gather during our lives, and make an altar for our own dreams and fears – is what he seems to want to say – we can look into ourselves and find the strength that is already there.

There where man comes into the picture, mostly literally; in photographs, photo manipulations or videos, Martha wants them to be not more than an evidence of life. He makes them deaf, blind, beheaded or nothing but a figure of non-importance in a horror vacuï surrounding of materials. In other occasions he uses icons, role models or politicians. But somehow they don’t seem as human as the bodiless surroundings they are put in. Even himself he depicts only with a mask, his mouth as a razor or his eyes taped off. Only a childhood picture, somewhere deep buried away in his early works, seems to have the honesty and pureness he seems to be looking for. Life stripped bare and bare stripped life. What is left is just a trace of stories…

Nancy Hoffmann

MARIANO COSTA PEUSER

construction series Boom and Bust Pictures of Miami in Transition Will Drive You Mad. The old saying that “schizophrenics might build sandcastles in the sky but it’s the psychiatrist who collects the rent” could easily reflect Mariano Costa-Peuser’s provocative Miami Construction series documenting the Magic City’s tottering skyline between 2003 and 2007. During those four years, the Argentine artist captured the dizzying spurts and fits of South Florida’s rocketing construction expansion and consequent collapse.

From the heights of the real estate market, when over 300 boom cranes towered over Downtown Miami, to its bust a few short years later when buildings were shuttered and property values plummeted, Costa-Peuser focused his lens on a city’s lurching identity crisis not unlike an analyst dissecting a fractured mind.

The Sunshine State is no stranger to boom-and-bust construction cycles.

A swampland boom in the 1920’s ended with a dramatic crash following a devastating hurricane in 1926. Many will remember that during the mid-1970’s a speculative bubble similar to the current one took an equally bad turn.

But what is remarkable about Costa-Peuser’s images of the recent construction bust is that the soaring boom cranes that reach toward the heavens, as symbols of a rising metropolis and runaway wealth, can now be read as metaphors for speculators with their heads in the clouds and clueless about local history and economic trends.

His photographs of cranes situated off the Atlantic coast and in Biscayne Bay, once a stinging commentary on the disregard for the environment can be revisited in a current light as abject reminders that poor urban planning, shady zoning laws and plain old-fashioned greed and dubious banking practices have all had a role in the recent economic downturn as well.

Those condos where the artist once snapped images of toy-like erector set cranes are largely empty. The thousands of drywallers, plumbers, carpenters and painters that labored on them are out of work and have drifted away.

Ironically it has been art and artists who have been the stalking horses for real estate developers seeking to turn Miami’s blighted urban areas around.

Costa-Peuser’s searing photographs remind one that while speculators and getrich-quick crackpots and crooked politicians come and go, the enduring power of a well-grounded image can’t be foreclosed upon and never fades.

Carlos Suarez de Jesus Art Critic

Upcoming Exhibition: TOY ART US November 20 , 2010 through January 31, 2011 Curator’s Voice Art Projects 2509 NW 2nd Ave. Miami, Fl. 33127 PH: +1 786 357 0568

Te gustan las flores... pero las arrancas Te gustan los peces... pero te los comes Te gustan las aves..... pero las enjaulas Me preguntas si te amo...Temo en responderte Jacques PrĂŠvert

It is a proposed installation with cage-shaped sculptures of human bodies. A pregnant woman living in the two parakeets love. A reflection on the duality of positive and negative space. On the confinement and freedom. A question about the contradictions and paradoxes within the limits of security and vulnerability of the contemporary human condition.

Dominican Republic Lives & works in Montpellier, France

miguelina RIVERA

Showcase award for the work “In your Skin”.

Modern Art Museum “International Triennial of the Caribbean,” 2010 Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo

Upon speaking of the present time of the artistic panorama of the Dominican Republic, necessarily one must remit to the great dynamism and gradual process of opening, that comes itself giving in the three last decades; being shown at present as a plural universe of artists, media and expressions, marked fundamentally by its interest in the human being -individual and collective-. With works understood as ways to see and to interpret the reality and like a complex testimony of its epoch.

In that sense, the Dominican art reinvents constantly its reading of the social problems, with a clear ethical commitment. In the case of MIGUELINA RIVERA, one of the most interesting artists of the environment of the Dominican visual arts and one of the most representative of the Dominican diaspora in Europe. It works repeatedly the theme of the identity -personal and cultural- undertaking thus the track as mark, like sign, as a trace... as individual element that identifies us. In the same way, there is in its work a constant worry by the environment, the ecological problems and the preservation of the nature.

Its work is without doubts, a self-reflexive process and of introspection, that results in works intimistas, car you index them and of great deep and expressive force charges poetics; being faced, in general sense, to the large formats, from time to time of monumental scale, and being grasped other so many, to more intimate themes relating to the interpersonal relations, to the family and questions of kind. body -female and male- charges forces formal and conceptual, upon presenting its complementariedad. Its analogy and differentiation...

Thus, the nest is presented as above-mentioned, symbolic space to the family and to the interpersonal relations. It shows perhaps of its worries environmentalists and study of its own femininity. In the same way, is occupied recurrently of the simbología of the female body, exploring its different facets, presenting the maternity -exclusive capacity of the human Being- in intimate relation with the feelings. Their recent works are looks of and since their own femininity, in reference to their identity. An identity subverten, done not stereotype. It interests me in that sense, upon speaking of the work of Miguelina Rivera, as in other occasions, to present the female identity, in the line of the thought of the French author Hélène Cixous, who plant that, the woman should write on itself, on her body and to be embedded inside her own history and to leave constancy of her identity.

“In your Skin” Rusty Steel, 2009 sculpture installation CMS High 175 Cms. Wide 42 Cms. Depth 37 Cms. Weight 25 Kg.

In this case, “In your skin”, 2009, Modern Art Museum Collection of Dominican Republic, is a composed installation by a female body -in the shape of cage- in whose body, of pregnant woman, two live “parakeets of love”. There, inside her, they sing and they are fed. In their interior they live and they move. On this the artist says, “is a reflection around the duality between the positive space and the negative. On the confinement and the liberty. A questioning on the contradictions or paradoxes between the limits of the security and the vulnerability of the contemporary human condition, between the autoprotección and the tyings of the individuality”. In final, an autobiographical work, that explores the female body and its simbología. Its special capacity to give life… Metaphor of the maternity.

“IN YOUR SKIN” By María Elena Ditrén Director of the Museum of Modern Art of Dominican Republic.

gustavo DUQUE

Rails at crimes against humanity

“All Changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” This observation, made by the Gallic poet, novelist, critic and Nobel laureate, Anatole France, resonates in Gustavo Duque’s provocative series of new work. It represents a radical departure for the Colombian-born painter. It also captures his searing analysis of the uncertainty permeating contemporary society.

Not unlike Goya observing the sleep of reason, Duque remains committed to exploring the tortured history of social injustice. He continues producing complex, powerful works embedded with a thoughtful, dark intelligence, sense of irony and a healthy skepticism that eschews heavy-handed references. Present in these large-format paintings are ominous chromatic ranges and an atmospheric unease typical of his familiar brand of moody, existentialist imagery.

Duque’s mastery of nuanced expressiveness remains notable in harrowing war and terrorist scenes. As before, in his earlier desolate landscapes populated by forlorn, anonymous figures, the artist maintains full control of the ambiance. In this austere series of works, Duque clusters knots of war and crime-ravaged souls within a harsh, withering light. Duque’s spectral figures, dramatically rendered with loose, gestural brush strokes in tarry black specks against bold swaths of spilled blood-red hues, exude an aura of mystery and appear to float in a vacuum.

In several pieces, the mournful flicker of shadows seeps into his unforgiving palette. Often he superimposes images, evoking the impression of chaos or the exploration of three-dimensionality. His canvases seem to unveil paintings within paintings, offering a visual translation of the rippling echoes of time and conveying the notion of loss filtered through the worn gauze of memory. These scenes appear as if issued from an unsettling reverie. Duque suggests that an unstructured brutality and ugliness consumes our society. He accomplishes this by ratcheting up the IV drip of tension among his nameless protagonists. Rather than offering solutions to these problems, Duque’s work invites the viewer to draw their own conclusions regarding society’s ills.

In works such as Madrid 03/11/04, Powerless and The Power of Terror, the artist confronts the spectator as a chronicler of the bleak fringes of the human condition. He evokes an intense image of anxiety or the aftermath of a terrible calamity. With these commanding and enigmatic paintings Duque reaches a new level of achievement in formal abstract terms. He does so without diminishing the power of his ongoing themes or surrendering his hope for a better world.

Madrid, 2010. Mixed media on canvas

Colombia Lives & works in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Terror e Impotencia - The Power of Terror, 2010. Acrylic on canvas

La Maldad - Powerless, 2010. Mixed media on canvas

sandra GARCIA PARDO Outside the box

For most women, a career in welding is not an option; it probably hasn’t ever crossed their minds. Reasons for this include how physically demanding a welding career can be and that it is an industry generally dominated by men. But there is another side to welding - the side where a women’s touch can make all the difference - welding art.

IRREVERSIBLE spoke with Sandra Garcia Pardo: IRR: Why welding Sandra?

Sandra Gracia Pardo (SGP): I did experiment with the welding process during my university days and it was a challenge at the very beginning. Nothing seemed to work because I was so fascinated seeing how the bright light was green through the protective lens and surrounded by a dark circle. It didn’t take long to feel the connection with welding, and once I got my first piece I felt so satisfied that immediately I wanted to start the next one. I was caught up in welding quickly and using power tools, gas tanks, torches, welding machine, etc., it made me feel as if I wasn’t a regular artist, since I had an uncommon knowledge for a woman.

IRR: what could you say about the materials you use in your work?

SGP: I get material from welding places, steel distributors or from the junkyards, and sometimes I can find a surprise on the street or at a friend’s house. At the beginning I looked for cast parts, the weirdest and the nicest ones, but I always finished building something new. I definitely enjoy creating works using sheets of metal, bars, pipes, etc., more than using existing pieces.

IRR: How long does it take to do one piece for example “9 The Number of Change”?

SGP: The creative process can be long or short, it all depends on many aspects of the piece that I am making, the materials, shape, complexity, texture, colors, message, etc.

A good example is my sculpture installation “9 - The Number of Change”. This work was created to celebrate the 9th anniversary of an art institution, 9 sculptures not bigger than 9x9 inches and all of them had to be connected. I went crazy. Close to the deadline and with no design for my theme about education. I was walking through a big room where there was always a seminar going on and they were blocking my studio door. But on that day I got happy and excited when I saw they were not there, only the empty chairs, and in seconds I connected my education theme with the chairs. Immediately I got paper and pencil to sketch my new sculpture.Then, after many sketches and a model, I cut 9 seats, 9 armrests, 9 letters for the backs and 18 bars for the legs. After cleaning this material, I started joining all these parts together. Painting was the last step. In this case I spent about 32 days making the sculpture

9 The number of Change. 2009. Welded Steel. 9”x72”x9”

It is still a Gucci. 2009. Welded Steel. 20”x11.5”x6”

Colombia Lives & works in Miami, Florida, USA

IRR: “ The Bags of the Vanities” series great paradox about ego in today’s world?

Louis Button. 2009. Welded Steel. 9”x11”x3.5”

Painful backpak. 2009. Welded Steel. 18”x14”x12”

SGP: This series is about the frivolous world we live in, where Mr. Money is what gives you the power and people want to radiate wealth.

The famous brands know according to that to the degree that they are able to play with the buyer’s ego and that there is an object of desire in one side of the window, there will always be buyers on the other side that will want it. So they create marketing techniques transforming an everyday article in an element of exclusivity by setting unreachable prices. I am sure some bags are made with good materials and it is supposed that they are going to last forever, but definitely the prices go beyond any reason, and that’s why they are perceived as exclusively for the use of the wealthy and powerful. It’s all about prestige and that is what has created an entire economic system of mass production. People may ask if it is the same in art. I say NO. An artist creation is unique, involves inspiration, creativity, a concept, philosophical ideas, not a business plan to make money. If an artist creates thinking of making money instead of wanting to transmit an idea, that artist is not truly an artist because he or she is focused more in marketing than in art itself.

In the case of my bag called “Testing: One, two, Louis!” I used a flat sheet of metal, rebars, and 2 cast pieces. I used a homemade bender, to bend the sheet of metal very carefully in order to get a smooth round bag, and I also bent the rebars until I got a nice double handle. I used grinders with different types of disks to clean the rusted material and give a special texture to the bag. Of course I used the welding machine, the oxy-acetylene equipment to cut, ; a rotary tool could be very useful besides a hammer, wire or electrodes, metal brush, clamps, magnets, and anything that just help.

IRR: The journey of teaching?

Many of you shall betray me. 2008. Welded Steel. 8”x32”x10”

SGP: I am not selfish about my knowledge because I don’t think what I do is a secret.

I can teach the techniques because they are also in books, but the real secret is inside everyone. I love doing art welding, so when a person comes to me saying she or he wants to learn I see myself in that person. I will do anything to help in developing or discovering that artistic soul.

IRR: What is the greatest accomplishment if any yet?

SGP: My greatest accomplishment is to have become what I wanted: To be an artist, because since that point I know many other good things have came to my professional life as well as personal. Without the decision of joining the Fine Arts School, I couldn’t be the person I am today, grown and focused in my art, with projects and dreams that I know will come true. Of course, this is not all; it gets more and more demanding each day, but also very satisfying.

miguel RODEZ

(Re)Defining Documentary Photography Goddess Durga is the mother of the universe and believed to be the power behind the work of creation, preservation, and destruction of the world. Since time immemorial she has been worshipped as the supreme power of the Supreme.

The Meaning of “Durga” The word “Durga” in Sanskrit means a fort, or a place which is difficult to overrun. Another meaning of “Durga” is “Durgatinashini,” which literally translates into “the one who eliminates sufferings.”

Thus, Hindus believe that goddess Durga protects her devotees from the evils of the world and at the same time removes their miseries.

Nava Durga: In Dashain, the nine forms of Goddess Durga are worshipped as each Goddess known as devis are famous for their different aspects and power. The images of all these forms emanating from Goddess Durga can be found in the Shovabhagwati Temple. The dance of Nava Durga begins each year during Dashain. The Nava Durga, together with four attendant Gods dance the step of tradition. It is believed that in many of her aspects, the Goddess will come down to inhabit the body of a dancer to be worshipped.

The Myth of Nava Durga: The nine Goddesses once lived in the forests near the city of Bhaktapur. It so happened that once a priest came upon them as they were dancing their secret dance of creation. Pretending to worship them, he hypnotized the goddesses and locked them in a secret room in his house. Curious to know what was in the room, the priest’s wife opened the door; and the goddesses rushed out in fury threatening to leave the city forever.The priest begged them to stay since their leaving would mean a disaster to the city. The goddesses agreed in a condition that every year, the people would perform a dance of the nava durga. A temple was built for them in the city ;the masks are kept in this temple for the Nava Durga dance in Dashain.

Cuban American Lives & works in Miami, Florida, USA

We don’t care about photos. We care even less about “projects”. We care about stories. We care about different ways of seeing. Many times we’ve thought about those stories that, as documentary photographers, we wanted to give refuge. And we knew that they were not going to be like the works which we’ve seen so many times and with which we’ve grown up: a map of icons in exotic places where only terrible things happen and where people are only unhappy. A world of black or white, distant and different from the world around us.

And this is how we came to understand the need for photography of proximity and the profound, a genre of photography where the stories that are told contain all the hues found in this world we live in. Stories told with photos that create a

Monkey Temple, Kathmandu, Nepal

link, that provoke thinking; a kind of thinking as complex as reality.

This is why we decided to open this window: as a place to display different ways of looking at things, visions committed to what surrounds us in a constant practice of understanding of ourselves and others. It also allows us a way to explain ourselves to ourselves. We want to start looking through the cracks, the gaps, the keyholes with an open and a flexible spirit, strengthened by the free formats of the digital era.

This is an open space for the most diverse forms of building visual discourse and its possibilities. It is an interactive space, critical, rebellious, open, participatory as well as restless and disturbing.

This is an invitation to think, to abandon common places and to start doubting. ...documentary testifies... to the bravery or (dare we name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble.Or who,like the astronauts,entertained us by showing us the places we never hope to go. War photography, slum photography, “subculture” or cult photography, photography of the foreign poor, photography of “deviance.”

Martha Rosler, from her essay, In, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography) and published in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Richard Bolton.

Bangkok Patpong Night Market, Thailand

Snake Charmer, village of Damak to Dharan, Nepal

Untitled-1 3

11/18/10 1:13 PM

Untitled-1 4

11/18/10 1:13 PM