The Fall and Rebirth of a Myth.

By Israel Castellanos.

Originally published in Gaceta de Cuba, Havana, No. 3, May–June 2000, pp. 62–63.

A little over two years ago, at the exhibition Evocation of Cuban Cinema, presented at the ICAIC Gallery during the 19th Film Festival, I first encountered House Swap (Se Permuta), a painting by Rubén Alpízar that now strikes me as a prelude.

At that time, the figures from diverse creations and origins, leaning out from the windows of a structure and sharing in the visual sabbath of public space, seemed — through their parodic spirit and theatrical mise-en-scène — to correspond with Juan Carlos Tabío’s film of the same name.

However, during the first half of March, standing before the series The Vertigo of Freedom (1999–2000), exhibited by the artist at La Acacia Gallery, I became convinced that the earlier work truly defined Alpízar’s new modus operandi, founded not merely on quotation and/or appropriation of artistic imagery, but rather on constant permutation. Thus, the mannerisms of Brueghel, Bosch, and creators from other epochs appear to migrate from one opening to another, from one building to the next. Fish abandon their natural habitat for the constructed environment. Icarus plummets now toward the sea, now toward the city.

The painter reiterates the presence of the window, though through two distinct conceptions: one as part of a building conceived like a theatrical stage set; the other as a “window-painting,” with landscape as background — though not functioning as a mere backdrop, but rather as the stage upon which the principal event unfolds: the fall of Icarus.

Although these constitute two modalities of pictorial perspective, they also become two modes of framing the reception of the event itself, which is virtually ignored by the characters inhabiting the “window-painting,” while in the other case it becomes theatrical, festive, carnivalesque — as Brueghel and Bosch themselves might have envisioned it.

Yet Alpízar’s creativity resists schematic interpretations precisely because it dynamites dogmas and established traditions. Consequently, within the works of the first group, interaction may also arise between the fall and the spectators: as when hunters attempt to shoot Icarus, mistaking him for a bird; or when the ingenious Daedalus’s son falls toward a pot of soup rather than into the sea, as the legend recounts. Indeed, a caustic sense of humor, bordering on choteo — that distinctly Cuban irreverent mockery — is one of the means through which Alpízar revitalizes the myth.

The works of this painter do not seek so much a “game of combinations” — to borrow José Lezama Lima’s phrase — although the ludic dimension associated with sarcasm has long been recurrent in the artist’s production. His method, which following the author of Confluencias we might call “mythic-critical,” does indeed seek “support in mythical epochs,” though not in pursuit of artistic legitimization, but rather in the form of parable. In this sense, it also participates in what the aforementioned essayist referred to as a “technique of fiction,” according to which:

“Everything must be reconstructed, reinvented anew, and the old myths, upon reappearing, will offer us their incantations and enigmas with an unfamiliar face. The fiction of myths are new myths, with new fatigues and terrors.” (p. 218)

The Vertigo of Freedom presents us with a different Icarus each time, situated within heterodox scenar(io)s unlike those of the original myth, thereby intensifying oblique — perhaps even neo-Baroque — readings. In the legend, the apprentice bird escaped from the Minotaur’s labyrinth; in Alpízar’s paintings he sometimes falls into a constructed urban enclosure, a kind of zoological and infernal microsociety that besieges him. They are different places, yet united through allegorical intent.

The exhibition seems to suggest not a shift in poetics, but rather a fatigue (perhaps even an exhaustion?) with the religious-Christian sphere and a redirection toward the legendary-pagan. Yet regardless, Alpízar continues to approach myth — whether Christ, Saint George, or Icarus — through a transhistorical sensibility still suspended within time and space.

Entirely described as a visual figure within framed windows that even function as viewfinders, the parable as a figure of thought concentrates on the descending arc of flight — another parabola, though incomplete. The painter is not interested in the ascending movement, which is merely presupposed and even hinted at in the form of a cloud: the expansion generated by freedom, the sensation of newfound power, ambition, vanity — the desire to rival the Sun — pleasure, illusion. No. Icarus multiplies himself in descent, which becomes increasingly grotesque insofar as it is celebrated, ignored, or violated by those who, at best, only manage to rise to the height of a building, supported by the “secure” foundation it provides, yet constrained by the fixed and enclosed structures imposed upon their free will.

There is something deeply dramatic in this existentialist parabola of the human being, who does not merely experience fleeting sensations. A slave to his former condition, he does not know what to do with his newly acquired gain. In his plunge he seeks refuge in the feminine sex — the “papaya” — which, beyond serving as homage to Reynerio Tamayo’s humorous eroticism, may also allude to the maternal womb. Thus, the cycle of the myth would appear complete — and ready to be reborn.