I had never exhibited in Havana before. I came for the first time two years ago, and I was impressed: a beautiful city. It was at the same time that Mr. Eusebio invited me to exhibit, he proposed the space in Carmen Montilla House in Old Havana, and I waited for this opportunity. I did not want to be seen as an outsider, but as one who could be part of their culture, of the same brotherhood. I wanted to be part of this city, not a stranger to this space, this atmosphere. I joined with the look of walking, of pride rescue and identity.
I have been working in painting and sculpture all my life. I'm constantly doing exhibitions. My previous exhibition was called Totems and shamans. I refer the shaman as the artist man, born fifteen thousand years ago in the caves of Altamira, but who expresses with a conceptually contemporary painting, which makes the link with the same Guernica by Picasso, not to make a long story... In art history there are three very important people: bison, horse and man. So when Picasso looks at Altamira, he knows that there comes the Guernica, artistically speaking.
My way to get started was precisely walking the streets of Old Havana and see the walls, review those which have been lost with the ghosts of predation, wear colors where visual images appear, with rich texture, color, a very diverse and wide vein, as if seen in a landscape, in the clouds, own pictures as characters who are shouting, warning of their existence.
What I hold is that sense of the experience of my eyes, deep, to rescue what is being seen, the models that will ruminate, to remove the background; and here the models are the walls of Old Havana, one part with graffiti from the enclosure into La Bodeguita del Medio, a mural being painted with very sharp black arrows ... the abstract part of the language, forms that come since fifteen thousand years, codes that only privileged people are going to read, which is eternal, not a fad, it is the continuing commitment of creating.
I had the exhibition of sculptures in Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato, Mexico, in the courtyard of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, which is big. There were thirty sculptures, and it took me a year because they are ceramic, of large format, seventy centimeters to one ninety; and bronze from small up to two forty high. It was an archaeological find of the pieces of the sculptures, which were found in Syria, Mesopotamia, others in Greece, in northern Spain, all making history, a story of my characters on the walls. I have the principle that while I'm working on an exhibition, I'm doing another one. It gave some time to the one in Havana to bring visual values, to do it in this handmade paper, that looks like a cloth, a fabric, and achieve that painterly effect, that would allow to "cook" the work, without losing the mark, the gesture of art. That it is not so suffered by the wear of being working it, and in turn have the freshness of spontaneity.
"This architect from Guanajuato arrives with the message of his paintings to our beloved Old Havana, to attest to this very fertile field of Mexican culture, a work full of passion. The artist has made real his views on the city and exhibits them in the house created by the Venezuelan Carmen Montilla, who always wanted this place was distinguished by promoting the outstanding of art. "
Eusebio Leal
I entitled it Serie de La Habana Vieja. It is the consequence, because a door opens other doors in the creative part: these walls are talking to me, they are telling me about something. I have no need to put an explanation. They are like characters in the street, it's like the shamanic part; they are those deep festive characters... brought from a dance event, a masquerade, as we say. They all jump of space, time, as hybrid monsters that correspond to the essence, that which goes up the man who is being carried.
I want to clarify something: museology is perfect. The museum curators have engaged the spirit of the work, professionally well armed and balanced. If we stand before this testimony, witness of architecture, next to my work, you will notice as something that is spoken, there is a dialogue between them, textures, time ... Yesterday, when young curators put that piece to the wall, it was as if he was a sculpture part of his own exhibition.
If I used that wall, though I can not, with some of the gestures of the line on the stone with my symbols, could be a work of mine, that outbreak from the skin, rock, lime, old colors behind all this lime. I feel it and really enjoy it. Doing some graffiti on the wall is an aggressive act, very strong, but time will make it blended. What follows or do not say, one just have to turn it into visual gestures, anything else matters.
