Esterio Segura exhibits Occidente Tropical exhibition at Factoría Habana

By: Maritza Mariana Hernandez

"As a kind of self-portrait and record of events personal taking place in the society" Esterio Segura describes its personal exhibition titled Occidente Tropical, which is opened at the Factoría Habana, a space for the creation and the experimentation of the Havana city’s Historian Office.

Curated by Concha Fontenla, the exhibition reflects what the artists has learned and lived before and during the creation of this work. This proposal “approaches us to the first project of a novel artist coming to Havana at the end of the 1980s with an extensive personal artistic background.

Thus, Segura assumes a group of works related to politics, philosophy, history, anthropology and Kitsch that are connected with a general interest in the anthropological and philosophical issue allowing understanding some part of the culture that had been developing in Cuba during the 80’s and 90’s of the last century.

Religious imagery is the formal core of this sculptures and images combination, in which elements of different cultural traditions converge and that in turn they reflect issues related to the socialist realism, the eclecticism by the sieve of the Cuban idiosyncrasy and the popular identity.

Esterio’s work reflects his passion for researching and the work he keeps intact despite the years. We also find renewal intentionality within the emerging Cuban plastic.

Despite his initial interest in the painting, the artist turns his concerns in the development of the volume... sculpture; he uses his artistic talent for sketching, rethinkin and retelling with great precision projects full of deep reflection, whose results allow you to shape the conceptualization and formal development of his ideas.

"The search for identity, self-reference, in" whose morphology highlights the narrative and an aesthetic intentionally kitsch that allow him to address topics such as religion and politics that through the Cuban idiosyncrasy and deeply rooted values in the popular identity, they resulted in some pieces in which semantics and icono related to Saints and heroes are mixed, achieving a cultural mestizaje (...) ", Fontenla concludes in the catalogue of the exhibition.

Inaugurated in December 2009 at Factoria Havana, it is conceived as a centre for interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue, which is opened to reflection on the socio-cultural processes marking the most recent artistic production and the search for conceptual and aesthetic alternatives that rethink the creation from different perspectives.

Source: Cubarte