Publications

Surrealism in Cuba?

- By Virginia Alberdi Benítez - Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban writer of universal hierarchy, was a witness in Paris to the appearance of the surrealism in the European culture of the period between the World Wars. He even wrote articles for the magazine Revolution Surrealiste at the request of André Breton. Being pursued by the tyranny of Gerardo Machado that at the end of the twenties of the last century kept Cuba under his rule, the writer moved to Europe. The French poet Roberto Desnos, affiliated to surrealism, facilitated for Carpentier to move to…Read more …

Naive, candid people?… Cubans!

- By Virginia Alberdi Benítez - The presence of Alicia Leal´s work in the Artemorfosis gallery, in Zurich, and her proximity to a certain poetics of the popular art in Cuba, encourages us to offer a panoramic on the expressions of a visual culture rooted in the Antillean Island. However, before that, we need to offer two explanations. One explanation is about the categories usually used to classify the work of the creators out of the academy. The other explanation points to the necessary distinction among the results of who paints and draws in…Read more …

From Cubanacan to the roads of the world: Tomás, Brey and Bedia

- By Virginia Alberdi Benítez - In 1981 an exhibition held at the International Center of Art in Havana became a reference point in the evolution of visual language in Cuba. Entitled as Volume I, a group of painters1 gathered works of dissimilar aesthetics showing an apparently paradoxical attitude to appropriate the tendencies of the time in the legitimating art centers in Europe and the United States and from them to inquire on the identities of cultures of the so-called Third World. Ten years later, several of the internationally recognized painters of that…Read more …
The Dream of Cubanacán

The Dream of Cubanacán

  – By Virginia Alberdi Benítez – When the biographies of Cuban painters, sculptors and engravers with a greater presence in the international circuits of exhibition and commercialization of the visual arts for the past five decades are reviewed, it is common to find a mutual reference in its formative stages: they have studied at the National Art School (ENA) or the Higher Institute of Art (ISA). Flora Fong, Ernesto Garcia Peña and Gilberto Frómeta, who displayed their works in solo-exhibitions at ArteMorfosis during 2015 and currently are presented side by side in…Read more …