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cal or ideological commitment to a certain system, or even to any form of indoctrination: it is a
way to keep their free and independent status.
A poetics of despair is a model for reflection
about an unsalvageable reality, one from which
people have distanced their selves and to which
they cannot return once they are hurt. On the other
hand, one also sees a form of introspection, a selfexamination and avoidance of collective dialog,
of the majority’s rhetoric. In this nihilist context,
the individual is increasingly concerned about his
or her life and everydayness in an individualized
struggle for survival.
What one sees in the plastic arts is the emergence
of the Geishas series, by Rocío García (1955),
with its feminine poetics. The subtleties of the facial expressions and social re-contextualization of
their characters treat the feminine condition with
irony, with profound lineal and chromatic austerity.
Their antecedents can be found in an earlier imagining of “girls” who are shown to be lost, tied
up, hung, and dominated by the image of culture,
in an attack on closed identities.
This creates a psychologically unqualifiable path
and transmutation, and later enshrines a reign of
violence and subjection through a profuse intertextual game with the Hombres machos marineros [Manly Sailormen] book series.
Rocío García’s ability to highlight a relationship
of feminine denunciation is unique in its perspective and enjoys warning us about the fragility of
the male sexual condition, as can be seen in certain typologies concerning the embarrassment
and camouflaging of male psychosexual identity
and its deconstructive metaphors regarding “phalocentric” hegemony.
Rocío is interested in the world of perversion, relaxed norms, and the particularly dramatic violence of homoerotic tensions that recall certain
scenes in U.S. African-American film.
The use of tricks or ruses in her work’s critical
approach is frequent; this is to avoid using the
term “homosexual,” under the pretext that her
work transcends sexuality in favor of a cultural
rhetoric.
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This switch silences Cuban art’s homoerotic
voice, and neutralizes its reach, legitimacy and
liberating effects.
Fear of calling things by their name reduces any
reading of Cuban plastic arts to a conceptual and
ideological platform that doesn’t rise to the level
of all aesthetic thinking and its authentic wealth.
With her back turned to the situation, Rocío creates work about human relations and transgender
love.
This view is sharp in its representation and use of
expressive methods employed in the plastic arts,
with brief stories that manage to breathe life into
the axioms of sexual behaviors, using the most licentious forms of homosexual love as her argument. Sexual freedom, unbridled Eros, full enjoyment of love and the body are some of the repeating truths in her work.
Gustavo César Echevarría’s pictorial series
Mámenle en raya [Suck it on the Line] comes on
the scene in precisely 1998 (he is also known as
Cutty). He has become famous not so much for
the very real provocations in his paintings, as it
should be, but because of criticism’s inability to
understand his pictorial transvestism, which is not
academic, but also not naïve. Neither is it neatly
retinal or exactly bad, either.
It’s charm is precisely in its extremely personal
montage of dissimilar crossings pursuing two, internally connected thematic lines. One of them is
the intimacy of women in domestic bathrooms,
exercising their ablutions and desires, which
prudish gazes see as scatological, despite their
naturalness.
The other is that of gay flirtation, the forceful repression of desire, with its culturally based conditioning factors in public restrooms and other socially lateral spaces that can be called heterotopias of imaginary context, like certain other postmodern social institutions.
Cutty allows himself the additional perversity of
organizing an entire sinuous tradition from the
history of western painting, in the form of a generic pastiche.