Testimony and Catharsis

By David Mateo

Journalist and Art Critic

Appropriation and playful engagement have been essential resources in Cuban painting over the last three decades. Few artistic communities in the region have derived as much benefit from these procedures in relation to the universal visual heritage as Cuban conceptual artists. Neither the informational isolation we endured for many years, nor the belated reassimilation of certain postmodern “heresies,” managed to diminish the determination and expectations with which we immersed ourselves in the history of art during the 1980s, reactivating an entire tropological arsenal through an open, multidirectional process that has continued to evolve through the incorporation of new generations of artists. 

Not only were we able to recover lost ground in the reassimilation of global representational paradigms, but we also succeeded in extending their relevance by combining them with other devices deeply rooted in our own cultural idiosyncrasy—humor, precariousness, and sarcasm. Through these strategies, Cuban artists have secured a distinctive place within the international art scene, a position in which we feel both comfortable and self-sufficient. 

Although the emergence in Cuba of a neo-expressionist mode of painting—one characterized by more detached and austere methodologies—has been widely acknowledged, and despite repeated assertions that postmodern thought is in profound decline, Cuban visual culture remains strongly influenced by a local form of postmodernism, particularly in its mechanisms of recontextualization and reinterpretation. There is, in fact, a significant sector of Cuban art that has sustained this tendency from the late 1980s to the present day. Among its most notable representatives are Lázaro García, Reinerio Tamayo, Pedro Álvarez, Armando Mariño, and Douglas Pérez, artists who have collectively shaped and renewed this discourse over successive generations. 

Since the early 1990s, Rubén Alpízar has occupied a prominent position within this group. His work shares with these artists a sustained interest in the recovery and relocation of historical references—Gothic, Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque—as well as a systematic use of parody and a caustic critical stance. Yet in his selection, manipulation, and combination of symbols, Alpízar reveals a process that is, in my view, considerably less structuralist and far more playful and expansive. This quality grants him a singular place within the broader context of contemporary Cuban art. 

Rubén Alpízar appears uninterested in the meticulous refinement of that collage of times, events, and symbols that characterizes the work of some of his contemporaries. He is not concerned with condensing historical references into a coherent alternative cosmography in which every element determines and reinforces the others. Such closed and internally logical worlds—those eclectic visual systems in which everything seems to fit harmoniously and where technical ingenuity serves as the principal vehicle of critical reflection—do not seem to be his primary objective. 

Instead, Alpízar emphasizes, through a far more direct and methodologically unrestrained cynicism, the paradoxical relationships among figures, codes, and emblems drawn from the history of art. He is unconcerned with how disconcerting or apparently incoherent these relationships may appear. Any formal strategy becomes legitimate if it contributes to this purpose. In a number of works, for example, the artist employs concave spaces or niche-like structures submerged in shadow in order to focus the viewer’s attention on the contradictions between signifiers and meanings. This approach can be observed in paintings such as Last Images of the Shipwreck (1998), I Wish It Would Rain Tea (1998), The Apple of Discord (1999), and What a Healthy Life, What a Perverse Mind (1998). In other works, he incorporates visual codes derived from graphic design and advertising posters, expanding his technical repertoire and multiplying the possibilities for visual and conceptual counterpoint, as in Divine Sacrament (1995) and the series End-of-Century Pamphlets (1996). 

When representing broader, more panoramic environments suggestive of surreal landscapes, Alpízar resorts to elemental settings in which disparity itself becomes the central subject: sky and earth, sea and land, elevation and depth, horizon and proximity. It is precisely within these fundamental oppositions that he stages his various scales of anachronism and absurdity, often heightening their allegorical tension through the use of complementary effects such as weightlessness and falling. 

Everything in Alpízar’s painting is subject to a principle of compositional estrangement, a form of theatrical eccentricity that reinforces the paradoxical relationships among the various elements of the image. Neither the technical sophistication of his draftsmanship nor the dreamlike quality of his imagery diminishes the force of this perspective. If there is one aspect that facilitates the spontaneous reception of his work—a quality that enables viewers to embrace paintings that often address persistent and unresolved social conflicts—it is the artist’s ability to grant equal importance both to questions of pictorial autonomy and to the reinterpretation of symbolic systems associated with particular historical periods and ideological frameworks.

Among the diverse origins of his imagery, Alpízar succeeds in assigning an equivalent degree of significance both to the universal icons of art history and to the socio-cultural emblems that have captured his imagination. At times, he is fortunate enough to work with images that embody both dimensions simultaneously. On occasion, this ambiguity of meaning is rendered with such subtlety that those unfamiliar with his work may find it difficult to determine whether the artist’s metaphor is directed toward the rhetorical condition and conceptual emptiness of certain symbols, or toward the revalidation of their original meanings. 

In the solo exhibition Ashes of Paradise, presented at the beginning of 2010 at Galería Villa Manuela, a number of works exemplified this free and unprejudiced exercise in symbolic interconnection. Particularly noteworthy is Ashes of Paradise II (2010), the painting that gave the exhibition its title. In this work, Alpízar devises a sarcastic analogy between the métier of contemporary art and the practice of spit-roasting. The painting ironizes those artistic formulas in which every conceivable precept is “cooked together,” creating the peculiar assortment of conceptual and aesthetic ingredients that shape both his own work and that of many of his contemporaries. 

Also significant are Trojan Horse II and Trojan Horse III, from the series Donations with Intrigues (2009). In these canvases, the artist moves beyond a simple allusion to the clash of cultures, subtly revealing the struggle of archetypes within an extremely tense reality poised on the verge of eruption. 

Although the notion of the inclusive and integrative subject has appeared repeatedly throughout the artist’s exhibition history, works such as My Ark (2010), included in Ashes of Paradise, begin to reveal a growing reliance on personal experience as the foundation of perception and representation. The painting establishes an ingenious parallel between an individual gradually becoming aware of his origins and life journey, and a locomotive moving steadily toward a defined destination while carrying with it an entire burden of identity, beliefs, passions, and inherited values. Unlike many of the artist’s recurring symbols, the locomotive is more deeply rooted in our economic, political, and cultural traditions, functioning as a particularly effective vehicle of self-reference within the discourse. 

The fullest manifestation of this process of self-examination, however, emerges in the five works that comprise the series The Taste of Tears (2010), as well as in the installation Saint Sebastian (2010), all of which were also exhibited at Villa Manuela. In my opinion, these pieces introduced the most significant innovation within the exhibition and suggest possible future directions for the artist’s practice. Compared to earlier works, these paintings are less playful and less spontaneous in the establishment of their symbolic relationships. They are more concise in their use of allegory—allegories that originate in the artist himself and ultimately return to him, completing a cycle of interpretation. 

In these works, the artist’s own silhouette governs the composition, occupying nearly the entire pictorial field. The niche-like or concave form that in previous paintings functioned primarily as a device for directing the viewer’s gaze now appears embedded within the artist’s body itself, traversing it from side to side with a striking luminosity. It not only shelters a cast of emblematic figures, but also opens onto a suggestive horizon beyond. The effect is that of one universe contained within another, one struggle unfolding inside another, the intimate and the public occupying the same visual and symbolic space. 

The placement of the artist’s figure with its back turned toward the viewer and facing the horizon constitutes a particularly revealing development in his recent work. In earlier paintings, characters typically confronted their circumstances from a frontal perspective; some even challenged the viewer directly with their gaze, paying little attention to what unfolded beyond them or to the symbolic implications of boundaries and horizons. Here, however, the horizon itself acquires an unprecedented significance. And as though this transformation were not sufficient, many of the figures inhabiting these compositions are themselves miniature replicas of the artist’s own physiognomy, assuming the roles of doubt, decline, and mortality that had previously been assigned to other recontextualized characters. 

Saint Sebastian (2010) pushes these reflections on artistic subjectivity to an extreme. Alpízar revisits one of the recurring themes of Renaissance art and transposes it into contemporary reality. He substitutes his own image for that of the Christian martyr; yet this time the body is pierced not by arrows, but by a barrage of coarse and offensive words. The work juxtaposes two manifestations of the same sacrifice, two forms of violence: the mysticism of martyrdom reduced to the level of vulgar language and popular aggressiveness. 

Judging from all that these singular self-portraits suggest—works in which the subject becomes at once pretext and consequence, observer and participant, testimony and accident—Rubén Alpízar appears to be bringing his existential anxieties and uncertainties to a cathartic threshold. In doing so, he subtly shifts the balance of his work toward a less ironic and considerably more vulnerable, dramatic engagement with the realities of island life. 

David Mateo
Havana, 2010.