Important Cuban Art Work Battle De Santiago De Cuba Famous Painting
Cruising along Avenida Raul Pujol, weathered brown hands on the wheel of his late-model Hyundai economy automobile, Cuban artist Alberto Lescay smiles and points toward El Parque Zoologico, which sits about a mile downwards the road from his private workshop in the stately Vista Alegre neighborhood.
More than just welcome open space amid the residential buildings in this urban development near four miles e of central Santiago, the park exterior the city's zoo holds a trifecta of elements that accept been crucial in the life and career of the renowned painter and sculptor.
"That tree is 'El Arbol de Paz' [The Tree of Peace]," Lescay, 66, says, referring to the site where Spanish armed services forces in 1898 surrendered during the Spanish-American War in which Republic of cuba gained its independence from Spain.
"The sculptures in the park were very inspiring to me seeing them when I was immature," he adds, explaining the second reason the park is and so significant for him. "They inspired me to become a sculptor."
El Arbol de Paz holds i other intensely personal memory for him. "That is where I had my first kiss," he said, a broad smile spreading across the face up framed by an unkempt salt-and-pepper mustache, beard and tightly curled pilus.
He's speaking in Spanish, which is translated past ane of his two machine passengers who are part of a group of about 2 dozen U.Due south. visitors exploring the music and arts of Cuba. Lescay is taking the afternoon to act as host and unofficial ltour guide.
Beyond bringing visitors to this spot where Cuban history, civilization and romance are inextricably entwined for Lescay, the artist is also boosting his profile in the U.S.
His works are on display through Jan. 6, along with pieces created by his artist-son, Alejandro Lescay, in "Vuelo Directo/Non-Stop" (Direct Flight/ Non-Stop) at the Cuban Art Space/Centre for Cuban Studies in New York City. He besides contributed samples of his abstract primitive sculptures and multimedia paintings at the recently concluded 2016 Art Basel exhibition in Miami.
At home, he is most widely known for designing and helping build the mammoth monument in Santiago memorializing Antonio Maceo Grajales, the Cuban general for whom the international airport in Cuba'due south 2nd-largest city likewise is named.
Dominating the middle of Santiago's Revolution Square, the piece of work, called "El Titan de Bronce" (The Statuary Titan) — after Maceo's nickname and the metallic chosen for the 53-foot-loftier sculpture — is the largest statue in the state. Maceo is seen on his equus caballus, portrayed rearing up as its chief waves his hand toward an implied battalion behind him. A few yards abroad, thrusting up from the hilly soil of Revolution Foursquare, are 23 massive athwart steel blades crafted from some 650 tons of Russian steel. For many, the blades represent the machetes that were a primal weapon of xixth century Cuban troops.
Lescay said the idea was twofold: to invoke the general leading his troops as Cuba fought for independence from Spain more than a century agone and to create a gesture of welcome to those entering Santiago past way of the major thoroughfare leading into the city that passes side by side to the sculpture.
"I imagine y'all know a little about Antonio Maceo and how he was a source of inspiration for the globe, not just for Cubans," Lescay said a 24-hour interval earlier while leading a casual tour of his primary workspace in Santiago, where he not simply creates his own pieces but trains and mentors younger Cuban artists.
"The quality of this human being equally a armed forces human was greatly admired, even in Europe," he said. Lescay's rich baritone voice exudes a gentleness of spirit whether he'southward speaking in stentorian tones of his respect for Cuban civilization or smiling equally he periodically peppers his comments with a witty quip.
I ever had Maceo every bit a role model. My grandfather fought in the war of independence ... so I really wanted to win the contest.
— Alberto Lescay, on winning "The Statuary Titan" commission
When the monument was dedicated on October. 14, 1991, Fidel Castro attended and Republic of cuba's longtime leader passed by it one final fourth dimension before this month as his country-spanning funeral procession stopped in front end of Lescay's work upon reaching Santiago for the internment of his ashes.
"I like the combination of the traditional and the very modern in his work," says Sandra Levinson, executive director of the Center for Cuban Studies, who met Lescay about 25 years ago, about the get-go of what is known in Republic of cuba as the "special period" post-obit the plummet of the Soviet Union and with it, the fiscal and other infrastructure support Cuba had long received from the U.S.Due south.R.
"In the Maceo sculpture, you've got the traditional hero on the equus caballus, only you lot also have these very conceptual machetes flying upwardly out of the ground," Levinson says.
"Also, I call back as a person, [Lescay is] so centered, nonetheless he'southward not in the least bit obsessive. He's very concentrated well-nigh his art and his delivery to [Cuban] gild, and the fashion he can help younger artists," she says, adding that the New York exhibition includes a few of his modest bronze sculptures, paintings, drawings and sketches.
"The fashion he moves through life, quietly, firmly, very strong — that's very impressive," she says. "He's not an average Cuban — he's very low-key…. One of the reasons we chose to invite him [to exhibit here] was that each time I took a group to Republic of cuba on an art tour, the visit with Alberto was the highlight of the trip."
Bernardo Navarro Tomas, the center's project manager and a Cuban artist himself who has lived in the U.S. for xiii years, adds, "His piece of work is astonishing. It has a strong influence of the abstract expressionists, simply information technology's not completely abstract.
"He besides uses representational images of the vodou religion that is a strong influence in that office of Cuba, that eastern part of the isle that'due south and so close to Haiti," Tomas says. "At that place'due south a departure betwixt that and the iconography of the Yoruba religion you see on the western role of the island."
For Lescay, like many of the xi million Cubans living on the island, Castro remains a folk hero.
"As a man, he was extremely simple, and had a common appearance," Lescay told an interviewer shortly after the November. 25 expiry of the man frequently referred to as "El Comandante," or more than frequently among Cubans but "Fidel." "Simply within seconds of talking to him, you realized that, no, although the style he communicated was ordinary, his thinking was monumental, boggling. I feel very sorry. Only men like him do not die — death is not for those men. The legacy of Fidel will be eternal — he will exist missed by the whole world, not merely Cubans, but all humanity."
Although Cuba is rife with statues memorializing armed services heroes such as Maceo and Capt.-Gen. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, every bit well as cultural figures like 19th century revolutionary poet Jose Marti, there are no statues in the country of Castro.
That is by prescript — a policy that helped Castro maintain a well-cultivated public persona equally a man of the people. Non meliorate or worse than any other child of La Revolucion, the 1959 coup in which Castro and his comrades overthrew U.Southward.-backed dictator Fulgencia Batista.
Lescay won the commission to build the Maceo monument more than a quarter-century ago.
"For me personally, I ever had Maceo equally a role model," he said. "My granddad fought in the war of independence, so I ever associated by grandad with Antonio Maceo. So I really wanted to win the contest."
The commission came with a substantial cash laurels. Lescay, yet, declined the prize coin, asking instead that the regime fund a foundation he had dreamed of creating to pass along skills he developed through studies at universities in Santiago and Havana as well as during six years he spent farther developing his art in Leningrad, Russia (now St. Petersburg).
Information technology was in Russian federation that he embraced that country's penchant for massive outdoor sculptures and monuments, putting his own spin on that literalist tradition with elements of abstract expressionism.
At the time the Maceo monument project began, in that location was only one artist he knew who was versed in the techniques of shaping such vast quantities of statuary — and, Lescay says, "he was over 80 at the time."
That'due south when he realized, "In order to make this [Maceo monument], nosotros had to create a school." Many of the earlier generation of artists who taught him were dying off, and fewer young Cubans were existence clean-cut to accept their places.
A squad of nigh 100 other artists was assembled, and they spent nine years on the piece that was defended in 1992. "We had to melt over 100 tons of bronze to make it," Lescay says.
The organization that grew out of that project, Fundacion Caguayo para Las Artes Monumentales y Aplicadas (Caguayo Foundation for Monumental and Applied Arts), is 21 years old. Information technology operates through Republic of cuba'due south Cultural Ministry and likewise is a fellow member of the Madrid,-based Latin American Confederation of Foundations.
Lescay is passionately and enthusiastically involved in many areas of the cultural life of Cuba and more broadly of the surrounding Caribbean area.
Other large-calibration sculptures he'due south fabricated dot the countryside, including another massive work, "Monumento de Cimarron" (Monument to Runaway Slaves), perched on a hilltop overlooking Poblano de Cobre, site of a 1731 slave revolt. In his studio, he too has a striking bust of Haitian revolution leader Francois-Dominique Toussaint 50'ouverture.
His bold abstruse paintings hang in numerous galleries, and he was given a stone star's greeting one evening when he dropped into the Casa de Trova— a hall for alive music and dancing — just off Plaza Cespedes at the centre of Santiago. He demurely acknowledged the ovation.
As an esteemed national figure, Lescay has the selection of living a comfortable life in the nation's capital. Only he prefers Santiago, where he was built-in, and where he has helped establish and continued to back up the Galeria Rene Valdes, a space for artists to showroom works and interact as part of the city's vibrant cultural community.
He watched unobtrusively from his seat at the border of the gallery's patio during an early on evening pocket-size performance by nueva trova singer Raul Torres, a young musician post-obit in the footsteps of pioneering Cuban singer-songwriters of the '60s and '70s Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanes, and their immediate successors such equally Carlos Varela and Frank Delgado.
Lescay also has fix up a communal live-work space several miles away from the gallery and his workshop in the Vista Alegra neighborhood, a chemical compound called Los Mamoncillos (The Booties) nigh the beach at the outskirts of the Reserva de biosfera Bacanao.
On the bulldoze that began with him pointing out the Tree of Peace, he stops en route to the arts compound for a detour through a massive outdoor sculpture garden in Baconao Park.
Lescay proudly points to gargantuan abstract pieces created by artists from Kingdom of spain, Deutschland and other countries who received commissions for works too executed on a chiliad calibration.
It'southward another instance of the regard with which arts are supported by Republic of cuba's "tropical socialist" government. All Cuban citizens receive subsistence levels of food, income, gratis housing, medical and dental care but still contend with "la lucha," the daily struggle to make ends come across, much less to exist able to work toward better living or working conditions for themselves and their families.
White-neckband professionals often hold 2nd or third jobs driving taxis or tending bar to supplement their governmental income.
That puts Lescay among the privileged few, with relatively comfortable living spaces both at his workshop studio and at Los Mamoncillos about xx miles abroad.
In various means he's continuing with his own version of la lucha: The want not merely to share the knowledge and skills he has learned from others through most of his life to a new generation of Cuban artists, but besides instill in them a like commitment to pass that torch along to yet younger generations.
"Es mi sueno," he said quietly. "That is my dream."
Encounter the almost-read stories in Entertainment this hour »
randy.lewis@latimes.com
Follow @RandyLewis2 on Twitter.com
For Classic Rock coverage, bring together us on Facebook
ALSO
The 'nueva trova' music of Cuba's Carlos Varela feels every bit timely equally ever
Dance music festival Manana comes to Cuba and magic ensues: 'Cubans have a right to demand concerts similar this'
L.A. helps Havana'due south vintage neon signs glow again: 'It marks a new era, a return of the calorie-free, of hope'
Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-cm-alberto-lescay-cuba-art-scuplture-20161223-htmlstory.html
0 Response to "Important Cuban Art Work Battle De Santiago De Cuba Famous Painting"
Post a Comment