Humberto Díaz. Contemporary art in several dimensions

Writing clearly, without subterfuges, metaphors, symbols or verbally difficult signs, Humberto Diaz has produced the largest and most spectacular works of Cuban contemporary art, huge enough as to subvert the scales of those contexts where they have been installed. I could even say that his works have ended up tensing the scale of this narrow, thin Island of 111,000 square kilometers and shy of mountains, causing enormous turmoil in the environment of a calm visual art over the last years.

It would only be enough to remember his installation of Tsunami, which occupied more than half of the almost monumental room at the Pabellon Cuba (Cuba Pavilion) in the 10^th Biennial of Havana,   2009, to notice that he is a creator able to take his imagination to its last consequences, and in depth he is sort of disbelieved and skeptical in reference to formats and conventional languages, because he always goes beyond something common, something settled down by histories, tendencies and traditions that, without realizing, they tie us to certain creation ways and reception of works and that, ultimately, they have also guided us, in general, toward a "correct" appreciation of aesthetic operations, legitimated by years and centuries. Although Tsunami surpassed any calculation and expectation that we had when we first listened about it, the fact that it also served as physical covering to spaces where there were several artists he invited to exhibit in his collective project Tales from the New World, prevented us to fully enjoy the total amount of such astonishing quantity of national tiles (more than 15 thousand), accumulated and deployed to look like giant waves able to surpass us, and to flood us, mere spectators amid an artistic international event of great magnitude like the Biennial of Havana.

This reached spectacular nature, paradoxically, seems not to match his character and temperament since his individual nature is rather of someone unbiased, moderated, favored by modesty, serenity and stillness in his behavior. Thus, those shines and fatuous fires that threaten us and they constantly take us away from a better understanding of the contemporary art, are very far from him. No one like him is more distant from that socially trivialized and banal behavior so common nowadays anywhere in the world, and from that other racket and typical fanfare of media promotions that we suffer and that occasionally flood our distorted information industries.

His proposals (of any dimension) respond with effectiveness to the space (open or closed) in first term, and then to the environment where they will be located: in none of them we find contradictions, inadequacies, useless confrontations among the ruling idea, the used concept or the foundation and its later formalization, as if for each project originated by him, he used a team of architects, landscapes painters and designers.

With 150 meters of rope, 2011, he modified the inner space of the Havana Gallery when integrating the collective exhibition Catastrophes. He used such a quantity of rope with almost didactic ends, in frank allusion to the different life’s stages of any human being. In the narrow, subtle, and large installation we observe objects in which rope traditionally intervenes, either as subjection, support or simply in a natural way. Without creating difficulties with the rest of the other exposed works, his installation acted like "conductive thread" of all the works presented in the exhibition, somehow integrating it, this way making cohesion: such is his grade of solidarity and respect toward others and his estrangement of any protagonist sign or interest.

This installation is again conceived for his participation in 52^nd Biennial of Venice, summer of 2013, to which he has been invited along with to other artists in one of the historical spaces of Arsenale, near to the also famous Corderia of the moving Italian city. Only that he now must use something more than the meters initially conceived, because an open beginning and an open end force him to create a thick rope roll to the entrance of the building, and to finish the work with its insertion in the adjacent waters of a typically Venetian channel, after having crossed from a tip to the other one the construction assigned to the international renowned event. His interest was mainly centered in the interaction with the public (just as it happened in the Havana experience), integrating the work to the habitual behavior of people, of those that live day by day, without prejudices in being gone up by one of the knotted parts of the installation, hanging from the roof, or to rock in the hammock which was also built for further enjoyment of visitors, both children and adults. The lengthened work walks through the whole building and the rest of the works of other invited artists, respecting them to the maximum, as if it contained the spirit of those medieval shops created to produce ropes and lines fit for the sailing that so much prestige granted to the port, commercial and cultural splendor of the city.

The ductility of this project of installation got the attention of the curator of this section of La Mostra di Venezia, among many other proposals sent from several places of the planet. Its sense and significance move from its extreme simplicity: its presence is obvious inside and outside of the enclosure, but it is alsoobvious its delicate invisibility, its authentic protagonist concealment, again expressed here like a constant in his condition as artist.

All his proposals settled down in Cuba don't prevent Humberto from participating several international events to which he is invited, besides the Biennial of Venice, or exhibitions in galleries and museums in Mexico, the United States, Russia, Italy, England, France, Germany, Austria, or South Korea. They neither prevent him, in spite of the scale and the big dimensions of many of them, to be interested in exploring other ways of creation of smaller dimension like photograph and video.

In this way Humberto represents that diversification, and the intellectual and creative width present today in extensive areas of the Cuban contemporary art (and in other areas of the world), that doesn't give up to the curatorial fashion imposed by the big events of the international circuit. His work goes through a group of reflections around art, life, existence, and time. From them arise those structures for their representation that he must use in each case; from them the forms are born in which they further materialize in front of the public. The central thing for him is to eliminate from our minds the habit and the routine, the customs and conventions imposed by inherited social codes, and apparently unmoved, that operate in reality without we hardly realize, and which  perturb our capacity of full understanding the very sense of our existence, of life in general.