MAON, Museum of 19th and 20th Century Art in Rende (CS)
July 16, 2015, 6:30 p.m.
Inauguration of the Exhibition
ALEJANDRO GARCIA
La razón fantastica
curated by Tonino Sicoli
with texts by Nelson Herrera Ysla and Rafael Acosta de Arriba
The exhibition opens on July 16 at 6:30 p.m. at the MAON, Museo d'arte dell'Otto e Novecento di Rende, the exhibition “ALEJANDRO GARCIA - La razón fantastico” curated by Tonino Sicoli, with texts by Nelson Herrera Ysla and Rafael Acosta de Arriba.
The exhibition, which will remain open to the public until September 12, 2015, presents a significant selection of the works of Alejandro Garcia, a Cuban artist born in Havana in 1974, who has already been present on the Italian art scene for fifteen years.
“It was 2000 when Garcia came to Calabria for the first time. He was a young man enthusiastic about his work, with a solid cultural education and good experience in Latin-American countries. He was fascinated by European art and was well informed about contemporary Western research. In Havana, to tell the truth, modern and contemporary art have always been held in high regard. Fidel Castro himself has never made a secret of his love for abstract art.
And Wilfred Lam is the recognized trait d'union between Cuban artistic culture and that of the historical avant-gardes of the European twentieth century. Garcia practiced a painting free from patterns in the sense that he was not tied to a typically Afro-Cuban ethnic vision but rather to a research rich in cultured contaminations borrowed from a revisited cubism and a post-abstract surrealism. He already revealed himself as an exuberant artist with a sure hand and a fervent imagination, gifted with pictorial mastery, with a deformed and ironic iconography, with quick and carefree gestures. That year he exhibited with two other Cuban artists in the exhibition “Alma de Cuba”, at the “Luigi Di Sarro” Center in Rome and, then, in the solo exhibition “InCUBAzione” at the Ar&s Gallery in Catanzaro, both curated by Tonino Sicoli.
Garcia's relationship with Italy over the course of fifteen years has been fueled by many solicitations, meetings, friendships, a shared coming and going, a renewed stay increasingly intense in activities, important productions, recurring exhibition events. In short, an art traveler in every sense, within a visionary and linguistically nomadic poetics, but also as an ambassador of a socio-cultural message for mutually respectful integration between peoples and different civilizations. Today, Garcia's geographical and cultural path takes on an even stronger meaning at a time when the events of Cuba are evolving towards a historical pacification with the United States and the Western world. New scenarios are opening up for the many artists who have kept alive their attachment to their ideal and aesthetic heritage and who have already sought, despite the known limitations on mobility, contacts and dialectical comparisons with the trends of contemporary world art, which sees its strongest examples in American and European art. The emergence of alternative realities and strong personalities, on the one hand, of their cultural "diversity" and, on the other, animated by the desire to interact with other contexts, gives hope for a beneficial action to counter fashions and the standardization of taste.
Not a genius loci of the 21st century, which recovers the modernized retrospective, but the authentic emergence of a creative spirit, capable of maneuvering between the brakes of the tradition of a society that has remained isolated for over half a century and the pushes towards the prevailing models of a mannered cosmopolitanism. Garcia, from this point of view, embraces an extremely complex condition in which the search for personal identity, which has already been underway for some time, is also the vector of the evolution of a society on the move.
It is not a question of redeny the past but to assume it with all its valences and contradictions, making it a basis from which to give birth to a new world. The recognitions that are coming to him in recent times are already the sign of an acceptance of his particular characteristic as a multicultural artist, belonging to that generation of forty-year-olds, who grew up under Castroism, have somehow represented with their silent reflection in art the preludes of the Cuban spring that began today with the resumption of diplomatic relations between the Cuban government and the White House. He lived art as an experience of total freedom, seeking truths in doubt, creating a thoughtful awareness, developing a critical conscience and dialectical thought. This is the path of the cultural revolution that regenerates itself and, carrying with it the seed of change, becomes permanent.
Cuba has always exercised a poetic fascination on many twentieth-century writers, from Lorca to Hemingway, from Sartre to Marquez, becoming an attraction also for artists of the recent avant-garde such as Mimmo Rotella, who had become friends with Garcia, thanks to their stays in Catanzaro and a good Havana cigar. The Biennal de La Habana itself, born in 1984, looked at art with an open mind, registering among Cuban artists of different generations significant presences and informed of what was happening on the international scene. In the 2015 edition, Garcia was also invited to the exhibition “Zona Franca”, which offered a detailed panorama of contemporary Cuban art. Already in 2014, the curator of the Biennal de La Habana Nelson Herrera Ysla had presented an exhibition of his at the Galeria Luz y Oficios.
In this exhibition at the MAON in Rende, which already has two of his works in its collections, the Cuban artist uses not only a text by Herrera Ysla but also a text by Rafael Acosta de Arriba, historian and art critic as well as president of the National Council of Plastic Arts of the Ministry of Culture of Cuba.”
(extract from the text by Tonino Sicoli, Un artista multiculturale, exhibition catalogue, Catanzaro 2015)
