Alpízar: The Cannibal’s Traps

By Carina Pino Santos

Art Critic, Professor, Curator, and Editor

“When it comes to images, I am a cannibal, a devourer,” confesses Rubén Alpízar in the living room of his apartment in Vedado, just a short distance from Havana’s Malecón and the Amadeo Roldán Theater. 

Alpízar is one of the most recognized painters in contemporary Cuban art and has undoubtedly become one of the leading exponents of neo-historicism on the island. 

The pronounced visual hedonism of his painting has inspired the emergence of numerous epigones, particularly during the first years of the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, many of these followers have remained trapped in a superficial triviality, ultimately resulting from a failure to grasp the meaning and internal coherence of a body of work that, at first glance, may appear appealing because of its singularity and immediate charm. 

Here the first riddle emerges: how does Alpízar’s work differ from that of those who seek to imitate it? Among his admirers there are, of course, artists who have achieved considerable technical skill and a visually attractive finish capable of appealing to the untrained viewer. Yet it is easy to perceive the conceptual emptiness that ultimately limits their proposals. The decisive distance between the creator and his followers lies precisely in what appears to be concealed beneath the apparent lightness of his paintings. Beneath that deceptive frivolity unfolds a profound reflection on the island’s reality and on the complexities of identity. 

The creator of a complex visual charade, a carnival where historical styles, figures, characters, and carefully studied appropriations of artistic genres and forms converge—particularly those of the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque—Alpízar is the protagonist of a practice that he embraces as a game, for it is he who establishes its rules and determines its meanings. 

The underlying substance of his work lies in the problematization of realities whose hidden destiny is rooted in that organized chaos known as the Caribbean, and more specifically, in the Cuban capacity to confront adversity through humor and irreverence. As Antonio Benítez Rojo observes in The Repeating Island:

“In Chicago, a tormented soul says, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ and turns to drugs or the most desperate forms of violence. In Havana, one would say, ‘The important thing is not to die!’ or perhaps, ‘Here I am, screwed but happy.’” 

And unlike what Hal Foster suggests in his reflections on the meaning of the “dream of pluralism: a sleepwalker in the museum,” Alpízar remains fully awake, stalking the interstices of universal art—primarily European and North American—in order to parody, both gravely and playfully, the canon of the West. 

His wandering “through time, culture, and metaphor” does not correspond to the model proposed by the theorist of postmodernity. Alpízar begins with his immediate surroundings and with a rigorous process of study. “I own many art books; whenever I travel, I buy as many as I can,” he remarks in the interview conducted for this volume. From this vast repertoire he constructs small narratives that he places within oculi, niches, drawers, and windows embedded in his paintings. References to the Spanish painter Juan Sánchez Cotán are frequent, particularly to the still life genre, which he employs as a genuine compositional leitmotif. 

At the same time, he manages to connect these seemingly independent stories through invisible bridges that unify the whole. These links are facilitated by a historicist language that serves as a common denominator; sometimes through the recurrence of certain characters, and at other times through their belonging to an imaginary world recognizable both through its symbols and its allusions to contemporary social realities. One might say that an Alpízar painting is not an orderly dictionary of images and icons derived from sixteenth- to eighteenth-century art history, but rather a fascinating anthology of them—masterfully disorganized and re-signified through the lens of insular experience. 

If, during the Middle Ages, it was common to encounter images of ships crewed by clerics transporting the mad—a recurring metaphor of the period, famously employed by one of history’s greatest artists, Hieronymus Bosch—Alpízar transforms that vessel into a craft suspended from a fishing rod and balanced by nothing less than a coveted carrot. 

The widespread use of these codes and strategies among Cuban artists is largely due to the fact that they privilege the value of painting as painting itself. Despite continuous rewritings, appropriations, and references to diverse authors, styles, and morphologies of Western art, this body of work remains firmly grounded in the historical conventions of taste. It prioritizes accessibility within the circuits of acquisition and exchange and, paradoxically, reaffirms artistic authorship, restoring the aura of the artwork and reinforcing its place within the coordinates of the art market. 

This artist, who defined himself from the outset as a “devourer,” has also ventured into installation art. He has done so according to the same playful logic that characterizes his painting. “The difficulty lies in the immediacy required to create these projects. It’s the same challenge sculptors face: a lack of space to store works that remain unsold,” he explains when asked about the continuity of certain methods and the transformations brought about by the incorporation of new resources. In some of these artistic adventures he has collaborated with his colleague and friend, the painter Reinerio Tamayo, with whom he has worked, in his own words, “four-handed.” 

Alpízar’s path only appears easy. He must confront the temptations of repetition, the complacent demands of success, and the comfort of stories already told. Only the challenges born of his own search can lead him toward new visual territories, open new windows, and encourage him to take unprecedented risks. In a world increasingly dominated by hypertextuality, his work continues to generate that sense of vertigo reminiscent of his Icarus suspended between flight and fall. 

Havana, 2006.