IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 143

ment to the enormous power of reflection, discernment and conceptualization
and, above all, irreverence they express
before the idolized, petrified norm.

artists, according to established models,
as parameters for artistic talent. A priori, the participants labeled themselves
in referring to their work as “Good Doing” and turned their backs on classical
ways a making art. Techné works like a
simulating strategy. Ernesto García, a
commentator, used comics and attempts
to make a commentary on universal
history; Alberto Casado orients his
work towards the history of Cuban art
and the way kitsch is made; Jorge Luis
Marrero, the Cuban Roy Liechtenstein,
interprets to scale the comics as art,
their artistic attitude and they way pop
art is made; Fernando Rodríguez, a
“heteronome,” constructs his work basing himself on the idea of an apocryphal
figure: Francisco de la Call, the blind
friend who orders the artist to create the
visual art of his dreams and desires;
Alexander Arreche and Dagoberto
Rodríguez (Dago y Ale), the Carpinteros, propose the fetishized object as a
hedonistic one. Given his documentation of Marcos Castillo’s work, he is
identified with Land Art and is a “painter for hire”; Osvaldo Yero, a popular
plaster artist, appropriates kitsch; Abel
Barroso, a woodcutter, offers an intertextual game between object, art history
and sex in his work; Carlos Caraicoa is
an anonymous “interventor” of urban
spaces; Esterio Segura’s work is historical baroque, officially mythical and
Dionisius-like imitator.

In February 1993, the CDVA exhibited
“Las Metáforas del Templo” [The Temple’s Metaphors] as a first, important
effort on the part of new artists to suggest the possible existence of a 1990s
“generation.” The exhibit was organized
and opened with work by 11 ISA students. It resulted in the one and only
catalogue—printed on poor quality paper—that shows the extraordinary efforts of the organizers and participants
during this time of crisis.
Acknowledged as utopia’s last refuge
and the beginning of a new wave in
contemporary Cuban art criticism and
rhetoric, this exhibit had the exhibitors
(artists) working as curators as well:
Esterio Segura and Carlos Garaicoa.
The latter of the two expressed the following in the catalogue: “the mirror
metaphor resituates the proper sense of
the unreal…, and uses as its indicator
the apparent, the represented, the simulated, which is born of postmodern
“cynicism”; production tactics and resources for constructing realities in art
and suggesting an understanding of an
expression or concept.”
Selection of the works for the exhibit
justifies the very essence of curatorship;
it replicates the assumed taxonomy of

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