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-
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