IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 41

He takes a woman with her back to us in a very special relationship with “a cloth” as she knows or understands she is being watched, until her covering becomes particularly lewd. He evokes sullen images that tend to frontally defy the spectator with a perceptive challenge like Pipi de lado [Sideways Penis], which fulfills its assumed obliqueness. Another one of the “behaviors” is that of the busy body or voyeur of the margin. This reveals an ability to find subtlety in finding Gustavo C. Echevarría La espléndida [The Spendid One] 1998 Acrylic on cardboard while mediating with insinuation that which is indirect. Whoever completes the meanings is the receptor of the artistic object: this is made possible through a series of experiences involving the conventions of his or her culture, ideology, psychology or life experiences as part of a particular society. Between 1997 and 1999, a manifest interest in certain aspects of plastic arts for using artistic discourse to deal with the race problem in Cuban art begins to emerge. What was being proposed was Gustavo C. Echevarría Paralelo [Parallel] 1998 Acrylic on cardboard and assuming the unrepeatable nature of a single human act that is, nonetheless, the most common and frequent of our possible private rituals. His painting is a public assault on the notion of private modesty, which goes from being thus to being a diligent, ontological examination of the human condition. His painting destabilizes furtive or unexplored rituals, remodeling fragments of reality that are not only the opposite of what is deemed important, but also openly fleeting and angular. Allegory is a strategy he employs via a series of already legitimated emblems or signs, using his discursive communicative code; it is part spectator or receptor and focused on his “deconstruction.” Thus he establishes a parable that attributes, by association, certain meanings to a sign Gustavo C. Echevarría La tímida Verde [The Timid Green One]1998 Acrylic on cardboard a different treatment of the problem, one that did not use Afro-Cuban religiosity and folklore, was not modified or controlled by the State, in its old desire to turn Cuba into an idyllic vacation spa. After years of abstinence, it was attempting to redefine tropical socialism for tourists by changing its carnival’s colors. In 1997, the exhibit Queloides I opens at the Casa de África at the same time the Anthropology of Transculturation conference is taking place. One of the event’s organizers, Ida Francheto, puts out a call for artists for a collective exhibit on AfroCuban subject matter, a project in which then curator Omar Pascual Castillo was beginning his work as a photographer. At that time, anyone who curated any collective exhibit did not get involved in anything that would be watched or cause con- 41