To my Aldonza Lorenzo

To my Aldonza Lorenzo....

“The Walking Knight without love was a leafless and fruitless tree and a soulless body....”

Don Quixote de La Mancha

I have always felt very complete –creatively speaking- by the environment, surroundings, settings, scene where I live and work.

Among the countless influences that feed me up is the works of Carlos Garcia de la Nuez, who honoured me with his friendship, was the tutor of my Graduation Thesis in San Alejandro Academy in 1986 and of the Superior Arts Institute(S.A.I.) of Havana in 1991.

He was also my professor as they were Bedia, Gustavo Acosta, Flavio Garciandía or Pepito Franco and even when he was not directly my professor, I have many referential points with the works of Humberto Castro.

In a recent interview Humberto consigns: “When coming to Europe, the educational and social horizon was another one for me, I took in an air of freedom; analysing that in Cuba I undertook critically social and political issues, the fact that I found myself in a new world with many other alternatives, made me decongest, it was leak valve which opened, let go vapours....”

? To how many walking ladies and knights the same things have had happened?

Besides being a creator where human beings are the axes or line, same as I try to create in my works....their bodies are apparent to me as continent shapes, grip sources and communicant vases.

I was also enthused, from the end of the eighties’ those themes particularly sensitive in Havana and altogether with other young artists, I became my creation into a political discourse both polemic and incisive for the government and its party members.

It was not enough with the workshops or galleries. We literally took out the arts to the streets.

Artists as Joel Rojas , who was expelled from the S.A.I. because of the content of his works or Eduardo Ponjuan whose exhibition in The Castle of The Royal Force was censured , those were one of the pretexts for the “adornment” of the many halls of the Institute with former  projects and interventions with “current” security guards , olive green dressed under sunshine or rain and let them be there and we were also forbidden places of meetings such as the Theatre Cafe of the Scenically Faculty.

Even when there is not much said of artists in jail such as Juan Sí González or Angelito Delgado, it was a lot done watching the commercial tracking of the carriage that could be stimulated outside Cuba....of course, of those with a lot of talent.

That originated a great sham on those who saw with authenticity that conceptual and formal turn which we tried to carry out. So the support of our discourse could be from the dust of the bodywork of a bus, the sidewalk or the folios of a notebook. Metaphor, symbolism and its acuteness were the things that made the public react.

In this series I be evidence for, there is; from a distance, even a romantic revaluation of the self ...prevarication.

The time, in intimacy, brings me to the romanticism that from the XIX century surrounds the objective Havana, or maybe out of that remembered city I invent myself.

I must let out very clear that I am established in Toledo, Castilla La Mancha, a land of Don Quixote’s walks and where El Greco made himself El Greco.

I am hooked up on The Romanticism that constitutes as this one in which we live, one of the more prolific and splendorous periods of arts.

And another movement that has always marked my works and has its real fundaments inherited from The Romanticism is Pop Art and specially the works of Tom Wesselman.

If we approach his way we notice the intention of creating an art destined to a wide range public, an art that choose its themes out of popular instruction, from streets, with its new contaminants: the mass media, television, publicity, comics, fashion, social events even when there is a hold on the debate about superficiality, vulgarity or frivolity, but emotionless and with a lack of philososophical sense.

I go back to Romanticism and it seems I enter Saint Lazarus or Dragons in my Old Havana in this hour, in which they say around here “the streets haven’t been put in” and I come across the heart breaking confessions of love and disillusion, the satire, religion, boredom the disregarded, the daily, the longing and the music...and this last has been inspiration and content, nonetheless music is more inspirational in me than plastic arts itself.

In fact, when those “damned artists” that I quoted had no other choice than to leave each on each side, I enrol myself in the adventures of musicians tours making plateaus and lightening even when also I tried theatre, dance and cinema.

My round about spiritual guide, and I think it still is Bob Dylan : The Irreverent. One of the composers and most prolific musicians of the XX Century . He oes at the same time a disc in a folk key than rock and roll going through jazz gospel or swing, but always taking good care of his lyrics.

I love this literary creativity where you are not attached to a representative manner nor to a code that grants your permanence in a collective memory.

The romantic artist seeks for the profound change of things vision. I see it and I raise my bet, keeping expressivity, exaltation the seek for freedom the diagnosis of the soul, the love to last night , loneliness tradition, the taste for the popular , but utilising zoom and postmodern criterion.

With “The blues a Sotavento” (Blues to leeward),is a cornerstone piece for my speech Romantic or “Wesselmantic”, it has soft and wave lines It’s the distinctive postcard of the violinist at the piano beside or the recite under the shadow of his muse and evolved in that light. At the edge of an errant sailboat (but with a “flip flop”).

Musicians as big as Wagner related colour with musical expression and Chopin said that the logic of sounds secession which he described with a physical term of colour “areola reflexion” was an analogical phenomenon to colours reflexions.

In Romanticism the borders’ between painting and music are defused.

At last, the erotic charge, sensuality as well as romantic as Caribbean ...how to surpass it  

I’m not following fetishisms or topics

To my understanding, there is, as a reaction to decadence, a regression to the spiritual and carnal topics.

There is not also my intention to make a neither sociological nor anthropological study but to spill the mental or emotional status with I go to bed and wake up , which navigates between humour, uncertainty, irony, the banality of perverse or the humanism in these iconoclast bodies , rotund, compact, defiant and impersonals.

If the leitmotiv is the nostalgic libido. A mixture formed by the goings and comings. The arts and conscience go out of Europe , goes to America, gets American and comes back to the Old Continent with its tropical tone , its colours which bark to the sarcastic optics

I stand up for the Freudian thesis of sexuality as a motor force that compels the individual...what am I going to do...I am Caribbean.  

That is why I must confess that my conclusiveness, my uplifting desire my sacred quivery is to move passion, soul and expectant appetites in my sweet Aldonanza, also known as Dulcinea and go from it to a cyber epistyle as a far idol ...a verse.

                          

                            “Oh sweetie, you do paint nice”