Toccata and Fugue 

“And this light?”
“It is your shadow…”
— Dulce María Loynaz

A theater of dreams raises its curtain to reveal a place reminiscent of the one where Minos confined Daedalus and his son Icarus. A labyrinth—as a metaphor for human existence—becomes Rubén Alpízar’s most recent artistic proposition.

Each pathway may embody an attitude, an emotion, a quest, a desire, or a reflection, scattered and interwoven in such a way that they compel the reconstruction of mythical thought from a contemporary perspective through an act of cultural recycling. Images rooted in the Late Gothic, the Renaissance, and especially the Baroque, are granted a new journey through the agency of this appropriator; their territoriality and fidelity dissolved by time, chronology, and history.

Within the artist’s approach lies a deliberate intention to recompose certain visual codes, to orchestrate a hybridized game of meanings, and to establish anachronism as a defining principle in works that even manipulate the serenity of their own hedonism.

Alpízar intensifies the mastery of fragmentation, privileging it over any homogenizing totality. In this exalted approach, details emerge as protagonists, assuming a central role.

Having selected the fragments, he assembles them and fearlessly takes the pulse of subtle chaos, allowing himself the pleasure of quotation while setting aside notions of original purity through a methodology that permits him to draw from the past according to his own necessities.

His strategy generates a sensation of ambiguity—an indeterminacy of historical status that arises after fracturing time itself and disrupting its recognizable and identifiable signs. Temporal synchronies are altered and reintroduced into the promiscuity of the present.

By activating multiple reservoirs of meaning, perception itself begins to slide into inexhaustibility. The discourse becomes allegory: an open, overflowing space that appears to surrender itself while simultaneously withholding its final revelation. The Baroque effect lends vigor to an accumulation of icons, texts, and systems of cognition reveling in their own entropy.

Consecrated by the displacements generated through new relationships, figures and ornaments reclaim their force within the image. Alongside them, still life revives the pictorial pleasure once embodied by Claesz. Within this harmonious interplay of genres, symbolic charges are set in motion, and with these resources the artist enters the realm of myth—remaining faithful to its human dimension—not merely to illustrate it, but to create it anew: transformed and perpetually unfinished.

The titles function as detonators of meaning, at least for that which remains available after the convergence of signs originating from diverse realms—religion, anthropology, folklore, psychoanalysis, among others. Yet this is only one possible route into the augural and untamed force opened by the dialogical relationship between the artist’s voice and the multitude of texts involved. Semantic associations produced through intertextuality ultimately escape the control—even of their creator.

The apparent formal simplicity sustained by compositional balance and reinforced through centrality does not diminish the mystical aura of these works—their rarefied, almost enchanted atmosphere—which invites the viewer toward intimacy, sensuality, and shadow.

Alpízar has chosen his actors for their capacity to destabilize univocal meaning, stripping them of inherited guilt and rendering homage to reproduction itself—the countless copies generated from yesterday into today. Thus emerge half-length male and female figures whose hands occasionally belong to others, whose garments are borrowed, and whose identities become fluid. The feminine presence transcends its generic condition and acquires the richness of a more complex trope.

These human beings, fixed in their impassive poses, are accompanied by tiny characters who hold the reins of unfolding events and serve as active agents throughout most scenes. Human qualities have been transferred to them: through incarnation they acquire breath, desire, passion, power, kindness, and will.

Fruits at the height of ripeness, together with botanical references, arrangements of dishes (imprisoned reservoirs of water), the malignancy of insects, bread, wine, and coins, compose the complete symbolic vocabulary of a universe of figures. Together they shape myth itself and, by dismantling anonymity, redeem intuition and irrationality.

Interwoven and operating through synecdoche, unmistakable traces of Venus, Apollo, Psyche, Destiny, Love, and Liberty emerge. Yet there are also elliptical references—including, among others, the myth of progress itself.

Will humanity lose the beauty of its kindness in the course of its destiny? Might this be a warning?

Like a mystic, Alpízar redeems the necessity of belief, approaching it from the perspective of his own time, precisely from its borders, drawing upon the power of magic and ritual. Through the testimony of his own consciousness, he introduces these spectral beings that complement philosophical and scientific truths. He unfolds and transforms our anxieties into dreams.

Sooner or later, we too must make a choice, after having been tempted like Paris and having flown like Icarus, despite all the traps that have always lain before us. Roland Barthes once wrote that “myth does not deny things; its function, on the contrary, is to speak about them. It simply purifies them, makes them innocent, transforms them into Nature and Eternity, and gives them a clarity derived not from explanation, but from affirmation.”

For all these reasons, I think with gratitude of this artist who banishes indifference. And although dreams have taught me about infinity, I allow myself, this time, to believe that Alpízar returns to us enigmas and souls, illuminating that brief instant in which they may once again be touched.

Caridad Blanco de la Cruz
Havana, August 10, 1997