The Freedom of Homo Ludens

“A touch of comedy is never too much
when the night sharpens its knife
and someone you once were trembles in the open air.”
— Eliseo Diego

“They proceeded with cheerful delicacy, as though afraid of making a mistake. They did not know that the game was necessary for a certain thing to happen, in the future, in a certain region.”
— Jorge Luis Borges

The screens have been opened. Every window is simultaneously exposed, laid bare in a parody of life. The gaze functions like a mouse, placing you before a niche. If you so desire, you may choose it. One or another will allow you to penetrate the absurd. You may plunge into comedy and become part of the game. With a double click, you enter, participating in the narratives through which Rubén Alpízar has programmed the actions.

The artist’s work revels in a playful “objecthood”; it tempts and seduces you. You may even find yourself believing in the flirtation of those useless cranks and handles that lend themselves to the deception of your hands. What a perverse simulation, inviting us into a delight to which we are all summoned! Yet the signs are there — precisely those that mimic the margins of a display screen — warning us that this is a farce. One may travel in every direction within the limits imposed by The Great Game.

Alpízar plays not only with the history of art: he himself plays, drawing us into the process while simultaneously casting doubt upon the notion of progress. Are we not all participants in a greater game — at times an excessive one — in which we wager everything, some even their very lives?

You will not be surprised by the multidirectionality of time or history. We have grown accustomed to anachronism, to a hybrid and promiscuous present. Those figures whom Alpízar has rendered familiar are once again repositioned. The characters of Bosch, Brueghel, and Watteau now coexist alongside those of Landaluce — figures whose alterity was once ridiculed. They may even be looking at you, yet for most of them you do not exist; they remain absorbed in themselves, occupied with transcending the difficulties imposed by the “virtue” of golf.

The refined irony that has long characterized the artist expands within the absurdity of the parallel worlds he constructs. He fractures power, displaces precision — reserving it solely for the deployment of painting as technique — and irreverently dismantles the elitist exclusivity of golf by opening it toward a more participatory socialization. The game becomes an exercise, a mediator, but above all Alpízar exalts it as a vehicle that facilitates communication. It demolishes inhibitions and breaks down hierarchies. To play requires spirit, skill, tenacity, and perseverance; in return, one obtains pleasure and freedom.

According to Johan Huizinga, play is a function saturated with meaning. These meanings are amplified in the diptych that gives this exhibition its title, as well as in other works within the series, yet they cannot be reduced either to intuition or merely to the spirit of the “players.”

To the formal connections between his series The Vertigo of Freedom, The Great Game, and The Taste of Democracy, Alpízar adds not only ludic qualities, but also the protagonism of desire, of searching, of choosing. It may well be that the game is nothing more than a ghetto in which we seek refuge. Yet one enters it for the pleasure, for the possibility of an individual breach through which we momentarily escape the molds imposed by history and the corsets of every form of power. In this sense, play becomes a liberating space that leaves reality outside while consuming itself entirely from within.

Its comings and goings, its sequences, strategies and tactics, its beginning and its end (or purpose), all form part of a capital that is both spiritual and socio-cultural. Play is always susceptible to repetition, yet its unfolding is never mimetic. It is enriched, on the one hand, by choice and possibility, and on the other by uncertainty, tension, and chance — actors, why not, in its unpredictable outcomes, much like the unrepeatable arrangement of figures within a kaleidoscope after each movement.

Every player is put to the test: physical faculties, endurance, imagination, intelligence, shrewdness, improvisation, and cunning, all in pursuit of victory, always within the boundaries established by each particular game. And let us not forget — as some do — ethics.

If you still have not lost the desire to play, choose your icons, your flavors; take risks, but please, put your whole self into the game.

Caridad Blanco de la Cruz
Havana, October 23, 2000

From the catalogue The Great Game, November–January 2001, Galería 23 y 12, Havana.