Few countries arouse as much curiosity as Cuba. Its politics, music, dance, countryside and poverty conspire to make it especially intriguing, especially to Americans who have long been prevented from visiting legally. Seeing the work of Cuban artists who live in Havana provides a fascinating window into life there, especially since those in this exhibit rank among the country’s most accomplished.
Abel Barroso expresses his political views in tactile wood sculptures like “Visa para El Dorado,” which shows a hand stamping a visa, a false promise of paradise. Kcho’s fierce charcoal drawing on canvas, “R.D.P,” depicts a confining world, made no freer by boats, used symbolically to suggest the hazardous journey of Cubans across the Strait of Florida. He contributed the exhibit’s largest work, “El Camino,” consisting of two huts connected to each other by a tunnel constructed of inner tubes from tires. One hut is furnished with symbols of poverty and the other with those of comfort, a commentary on man’s aspirations to a better life, and the difficulty—and perhaps ambiguity—surrounding its achievment.
“Visa para El Dorado,” by Abel Barros.
Against a red-and-black background, Roberto Diago constructed impenetrable columns of small squares, linked by steel wire, in “Estudio 1,” a tapestry of pain. His forbidding “La energia del mundo,” consists of a metal sheet painted to resemble a boarded-up wall, decorated with a black mask and the word “yo.” William Perez’s “Luz propia,” a sculpture of Plexiglas, encases a portrait of José Martí, the leading Cuban revolutionary in the war for independence from Spain. The head and face are covered in tiny fiber optic lights, elegantly preserving the past. Ernesto Rancano’s created the powerful “Noble ser 2,” a sculpture of an iron shovel, its handle covered in nails, perched on a block of wood, ready to dig a grave.
As Corina Matamoros, chief curator at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, described the work in this exhibition, “It draws us inward to the dark corners, to the coarseness of the materials and their implied meanings, to the sublimely humble, to the environment that brings the works together, to Habana profunda (deep Havana).”
Through June 18, Marlborough Gallery, 40 W. 57th St., 212-541-4900.
