SPOTLIGHIT

Orlando Mesa Suarez.

All the ideas are in my head

Orlando was recruited at a very young age in 1962 by the recently created Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) in Pinar del Río, his native city. It was an almost forced recruitment as the country needed men to face the October Crisis, also known as the Missile Crisis.

 

Orlando was fascinated by the idea of joining the Air Force, a dream that would be granted years later when he was allowed to study military aeronautics in the former Soviet Union. (...)

 

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Art Brut CUBA

¿por qué volver a interesarse por este país? Porque su naturaleza insular, su historia y su territorio, durante mucho tiempo aislado del mundo por razones políticas y económicas, hacen potencialmente de Cuba un terreno fértil para producciones realizadas al margen de toda influencia artística. Sin embargo, y por estas mismas razones, también es mucho más difícil que en otros lugares desviarse de las normas colectivas y reivindicar la singularidad en materia artística.

Art Brut CUBA propone entonces regresar, cuarenta y un años después, a este evento reuniendo una selección de dibujos y pinturas de estos creadores históricos, junto a obras de artistas contemporáneos del Art Brut, promovida por el Estudio Riera de La Habana, y presentada para por primera vez en la Collection de l'Art Brut. En total, esta vez se exponen 266 obras (dibujos, pinturas, collages, ensamblajes y adornos), así como fotografías.

 

Texto y curaduría por Sarah Lombardi, directora de la Colección Art Brut

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Lázaro A. Martínez Durán: Los antiversos de la locura.

Sin haberme leído Locura y civilización. Historia de la locura en la época clásica (1) de Michel Foulcault, ni ser especialista en la materia, tendré el atrevimiento de resumir esta patología ―es decir, la locura― en dos tipos, Que serían: la que se busca padecer, un tipo de locura “autoprocurada” (a través de drogas, estilos de vida intencionados) y la que llega de imprevisto, sin desearla.

Son clasificaciones un poco reduccionistas, de escaso fundamento, las cuales ni tan siquiera son las más coherentes con los enfoques abordados sobre el tema en la actualidad, pero que en efecto, me serán útiles para acercarme a algunas de las cuestiones que, en mi opinión, condicionan la obra más reciente de Lázaro Antonio Martínez Durán, artista brut cubano. (...)

 

Texto de Yenisel Osuna Morales

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José Grau Brito: “Socialismo y al que no le guste…”

En la vida de José Grau Brito (La Habana, 1951)[1] emergen algunos de los grandes relatos de la historia sociopolítica de nuestro país: emigración, Operación Peter Pan, UMAP, exclusión social, etc.

 

De cómo los vivió, va contando partes. Algunas todavía muy bajito, para no atraer a “los demonios” que andan todavía sueltos y poder quitarse de encima, de una vez por todas, los ojos que han estado vigilándolo durante toda su existencia.

 

Texto de Yenisel Osuna Morales

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NEWS

 

"ART BRUT PROJECT CUBA: CONTEMPORARY VISIONS INSIDE THE CUBAN ART"

 

 

"The contemporary as an innate quality".

 

The contemporary is not a quality that has been added to Art brut or Outsider art. They were not inoculated to look like manifestations of this time. The contemporary was always there. From the very beginning. From the moment that a Wölfli (1) composed such experimental notations that music and art never quite knew where to place them, or that a Kea Tawana (2) wandered through demolished sites and ruined buildings collecting waste to build her imposing Ark, an Ark erected in the middle of abandoned Newark. The contemporary has always been, since the genesis and development of these peripheral expressions, as a sort of daily presence, perhaps ignored or overlooked because there were other more important things -other features, essences- towards which it was necessary to look, in order to understand.

 

And when did these manifestations seem to become more emphatically contemporary? When the contemporary, as a rule, has ceased to impress, to provoke perplexity, like a slow and sad decline. It is then, when the artist of this time says things like: "we have to learn from them" (from the brut, the marginal, the peripheral ones). "We must learn their tricks".

 

An ideal is thus enlivened, where attention is paid to the ideo-aesthetic qualities of marginal creation that leads it to claim, in its own right, a place within the contemporary endeavor, and to share in the spirit of the present, and provide it with meanings that become guarantors of the redefinitions to which it is constantly necessary to submit these concepts. 

 

It is almost impossible to think of this time, the time of now, without problematizing any of the ways in which we dare to separate an artistic phenomenon within the complex web of relationships and diverse forms of interconnection, in the midst of which, we know, voices, narratives, discourses, ways of doing things emerge and are reconfigured. How can we think that there is something isolated in the art scene, when the territories of creation are a dynamic structure of journeys and encounters?

 

It is therefore, that works such as the ones gathered here seek not only to make us aware of the natural existence of these links, but also to summon reflections that put on the table the inherent ways in which marginal art participates in the spirit of the contemporary. We find ourselves here in front of creations that enclose complex levels of significance; that take to unsuspected limits the ways of experimenting, that reach a very high metaphorical flight, a plural symbology born many times in the midst of moments of delirium, states of trances, tempestuousness. Although the structuring of messages in works such as these (given their brut or outsider nature) do not come from the most reasoned thinking or from the most common forms of the intellectual, but from the unconscious (where another type of thought dwells), we must say that also from these more hermetic, convoluted forms of expression, a will to communicate is projected, which expands towards different interpretative dimensions.

 

There is much that is contemporary in the gesture of overcoming a very strong desire to study art, of not being able to do so, but still manage to build, almost from the feverish, complex, fantastic compositions like the ones Deniyan (3) has made. There is a lot of contemporary in the way of approaching geometric abstraction -an expression that participates more in logical than emotional thinking- and to do it by the urgency of emptying delirium, compulsion, by dint of purely intuitive procedures as in the case of the pieces of Jesus (4) and Reyniel (5). There is also a lot of contemporary in the fact that a doctor (6) ends up stamping with ash and coffee, the entities and energies that he encounters from the interaction with his patients after sessions of traditional Asian medicine. There is a lot of bizarre and dazzle in all this.

 

And it is in those discordant aspects that can be found behind each work -which are not solely limited to formal, technical or aesthetic issues- that the contemporary is most strongly rooted; in that capacity to break with the obvious ways of reading creation, and to find forms that generally produce more enigmas than certainties.

 

Yenisel Osuna Morales

 

Notes

1. Adolf Wölfli (Switzerland, 1864-1930), one of the first artists recognized within Art brut. His work includes musical notations that contemporary experimental musicians have interpreted.

2. Kea Tawana (United States, 1935-2016), self-taught artist known for her work The Ark, a 3-story, 86-foot-long boat she built in Newark, New Jersey, beginning in 1982.

3. Deniyan Masa Tamayo. La Habana, 1989

4. Jesús Ávila Chávez. La Habana, 1962

5. Reyniel Quirce Hernández. La Habana, 1979

6. Máximo Martínez Rondón. Santiago de Cuba, 1989

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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