Identity and the Accumulation of Memory 

Identity and the Accumulation of Memory 

 ^{PRESS RELEASE}

CONTEMPORARY CUBAN ART 

Tony Chirinos, Guillermo Lorente, Jesús Rivera, Juana Valdés, Alexis Mendoza, Margarita Fresco Crespo, Mario Petrirena, Nelson Alvarez, Renelio Marín, Raúl Villarreal. 

EXHIBITION CURATOR: Alexis Mendoza 

December 4th to December 27th 2013 

Opening Reception December 6th 2013 From: 6-9PM 

Boricua College Art Gallery 

Manhattan - Audubon Terrace Campus 3755 Broadway (@ 156 Street New York, NY 10032
(212) 694-1000

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Identity and the Accumulation of Memory

^{CONTEMPORARY CUBAN ART ARTISTS}

^ARTISTAS:

Anthony Chirinos, (photography)

Guillermo Lorente, (painting)

Jesús Rivera, (sculpture and printmaking)

Juana Valdés, (mixed media)

Alexis Mendoza, (painting)

Margarita Fresco Crespo, (photography)

Mario Petrirena, (photography)

Nelson Alvarez, (painting)

Raúl Villareal, (painting)

Renelio Marín, (painting)

Historically, Cuban art has always been influenced by some combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. At one extreme, a creative being's reward for making work is the satisfaction of the creative act itself. And at the other, art is produced purely for personal joy. The right mix of talent, intrinsic motivation, and external support is needed for a sustainable and vibrant environment for artistic innovation. The autonomy of Cuban culture, which for decades, so considerately used its limited resources to have the greatest impact on the rest of the world. All controversy aside, by deliberately choosing to fund the most promising artists precisely when they found themselves on the brink of a breakthrough, they effectively managed to underwrite a very fertile period of artistic production in Cuba art history. This exhibition explores art‘s autonomy not as a genuine theoretical claim but as strategic one, where the suggestion is that only by claiming that art from Cuba is indemnified by its very nature against moral culture can we prevent the forms of censorship that art is regularly subject to. But this strategic appeal to autonomy may purchase art‘s freedom only at the cost of denying Cuban art‘s power. For the most parts Cuban officials and institutions have been over the years inconsistent and unsupported. I believe that a society that supports the arts supports the cultivation of minds that are able to pay attention, to think and notice what's on artists‘ minds become a habitual experience. Only then are there opportunities to reinforce the national culture. That will be the ultimate autonomy.

The culminations of the process of flowering of Cuban fine arts. It is due to the desires of a new generation of artists for whom artistic creation responds to a cognitive reasoning, inquiry, intellectual, in tune with the times that art have to offer, and a moment of dominance in reality national orthodox ideas and schematic with which the artist expresses their discontent. At the same time a movement which gathers the emancipatory aspirations of the old vanguards for a moment of isolation between the artistic and intellectual movement is a transgressor, descanonizador that in its poetic language and integrating the current postmodernism. —The evolution within the Cuban art in its days opens a field of new interaction in the universe of the cultures. Cultural pragmatism cans easily transverse borders. The barrier that separates cultural evolution is complex matrix with interplay of differential ranging from those of language and region to dietary habits—. When contact with art take place, the image each has of the other is replete with exotericism, and it is very difficult for a moment to develop in the direction of common denomination. —Every culture is aware of the existence of other cultural universes foreign to its own—. Broadly is revitalizes historical-political discourse disarticulated dogmas of the history and symbols, is prioritize the specific values of art and operates the path of ownership, installations, readymade, and concept art object and manifestations of ephemeral art: happenings and performances. It assimilates the visual communication of popular culture, kitsch, wit, and anthropological reflection on the nature, myth as an element of our indigenous culture and Third World Latin American identity. They show new ways to creates art, and both the painting as other manifestations of art exchange relations with each other more freely techniques, whichever often mixed. Cuban art in the second half of this decade, it seemed that every other day-time were prone to illusion, the idea of —the street would be permanently taken by the artists—. The aspects of reality, phenomena that attest to the importance that Cuban culture it is subject to.

But if the culture has been metaphor - that is, in some sense 'image' of this dichotomy, it has been less light, the senses and the "environment" are world. It is not free-in the sense of a historical tracking of thought that the operations are generically referred to as reflection, and its highest flights immaterial, as speculation. And in this sense, it is no less significant that, at least for some philosophical tradition, the constitution of the world around Cuban art has operated under a cleavage more-or-less full of self in the speech, in a movement ad-infinitum going remaking itself as a myth that supposed utopia as verisimilitude. Expansion that finds its justification in the processes of capital as in the technological and scientific development partners to the Cuban society. And it is also a truism that clarify the picture substantially participated in this process. Cuban art is fitting of every cultural aspect of its history, good or bad, positive or negative. Cuban artists use what we call 'popular' narration, the problems surrounding conditions, and limits modes of experience, and expanded, has found no semblance of solution-in the sense historical narrative, but rather has stepped up the exasperation, their condition problematic insofar as it is increasingly desgajada, not only in terms of possible experience"real", but in particular, how much it has been becoming so fragmented entity " »from the various humanities disciplines that comprehensively articulated that situation sincronizándola to the processes of art.

Here we has drawn unlikely under current conditions, memory, proposing instead a problematization of the same to the extent that we would no longer or with a referential field or with the discursive strategies capable of taking charge of the experience under the operations disolutivas that ideology, while constituting each of the moments of the object has practiced on the disciplines that seek to address it. The memory and dissolved, and could not articulate that experience, today, yesterday. Cuban artists "design" new instrumental, the same strategy, the possibility of entering the territory of this text and of the doubt, and memory-in its many forms-enter only traces, fingerprints, as recognizable entities minimally, since narrated have been imposed and socially, a movement that has come to be called the "Identity‖. Thus, the recent history becomes unspeakable, beyond the 'facts' that have been shaped by the various devices to be able to organize art and ideology, and the past, near or far, it becomes impossible to articulate what today is a poor imitation of vague experience.

This apparent paradox suggests a key to the appeal of the work and, possibly, its meaning: the attempt to reconcile-where hope does not deny intelligence-human nature and postmodern vortex. Such haste portrayed in paintings or natural grace with which shows us what we usually see, it has to remind us what our developed and artificial (human) nature, and in its surprising harmony, to learn again to live together discomfort with that essential. The novelty resides not in the discovery of variants but in the recognition of their legitimacy. There is nothing new in the awareness that Cuban culture proposes different solutions; what it is new is that all these solutions are valid. Access to it is no longer to be found by Cuban art within itself but through the interrelation and intercommunication between artists living in and outside the island. History and the changes in it create awareness that Cuban culture is too complex to be encompassed through a single approach. It is in the work of Cuban artists, regardless the place in this world they live, that we are able to find aspects of our own existence. Cuban art it is not just a cultural manifestation, it is also a cultural way of life for those live by it (artists, curators, critics, collectors, dealers, etc.). The work of Cuban artists living in any part of this world, tells us the anxious evolution in the styles and techniques used by them to show us their findings. Cultural autonomy may be defined at first pass as diverging from the traditional aesthetic or values of the audience, and beauty as touching on this sense of aesthetic or values in a fundamental way. The term is highly subjective and audience-dependent, so societal definitions of the terms may be difficult or impossible. They remain intensely personal in interpretation. In Cuban art, intentional emancipation may occasionally be considered socio-political for its originality and interest, for focusing an aesthetic discipline on something not conventionally considered aesthetically pleasing to the senses. In real, personal experience, the opposite is true, and intentional autonomy is unlikely to achieve emotion in any sense of the word, such as an emotion that parlays into an intentional action. But unintentional emancipation in life may often be beautiful. Experience accumulated over time determines how we make sense of the world, and, by extension, what we do with our lives. These Cuban artists provide the opportunity to examine and pay attention to the nature of habitual experience. For those of us who engage this opportunity, the nature of experience is questioned and often changed. Cuban art is the result of careful looking. It is impossible to pay close attention to all of the details of everything around us during the course of most days. Art provides an opportunity to slow down and appreciate details that just exist, that are not necessarily for something or toward some purpose. Art within the Cuban society changes the way people conduct theme self by being part of it. Art can also be about the people, but primarily it is, in itself, an element within the Cuban culture experience.

Alexis Mendoza, Exhibition Curator

Alexis Mendoza is an artist, writer and independent curator, co-founder and co-curator of the Bronx Latin American Art Biennial. Born in 1972, Havana City, Cuba and moved to the United States in 1995. His past education includes the National School of Fine Art San Alejandro (1988), graduated in Art History from Havana University (1994), Internship in Fine Art Conservation at the National Museum of Fine Art in Havana (1992-93). Alexis Mendoza exhibited his artworks in museums and galleries around the world in countries such as: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, England, France, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and United State. Alexis Mendoza is also the author of books, such as: “Latin America, The Culture and the New Men”; “Objective Reference of Painting: The work of Ismael Checo, 1986-2006”; Reflections: The Sensationalism of the Art from Cuba. All three published by Wasteland Press; and Rigo Peralta: Revelaciones de un Universo Mistico, publish by Argos Publications, Dominican Republic. Presently Alexis Mendoza lives and work in New York City.

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