IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 135

The images in the sculptural installation
titled Esta es tu obra, by Rubén de
Torres Llorca, which was displayed at
Havana’s Museo Nacional de Bellas
Artes, are within a complicated scheme
reflective of our roots, like the stepped,
pyramid-shaped,
classic,
commemorative pedestal, numerous
protruding niches made to contain
countless figurines representing the
plentiful, ornamental kitsch of Cuban
homes (plaster zoomorphisms and
decorations), as well as frequent Indian
heads with busts of presumed heroes
with unknown faces and extremely
popular, religious images that contain
the complex worldview of ideologies or
creeds. These are multiple foci on the
dormant religiosity that are suddenly
emerging when the country is going
through the worst crisis in its history and
survival implies taking greater risks. A
large portion of the Cuban people
returned to faith as if it were a table
offering salvation. It is place for
invocation in the midst of all the Special
Period’s uncertainty. In 1991, the
Communist
Party
approved
the
participation of its members in any
religion; this was backed by a
constitutional amendment created by a
lay State. In the context of everyday
problems, the encounter between heroic

and religious iconography exalts
topological cohesion and the attention of
political leaders. It brings the gods down
to Earth and honors art’s critical depth in
the work of many plastic artists. Their
dissimilar interpretations of the symbols
of earthly and spiritual powers
celebrated an openly polysemic and
problematizing mark on heroic as well as
religious iconography within a context
known as that of “New Cuban Art.”
Some artists who were already initiated
in Afro-Cuban religions or shaped at the
center of their long-lived traditions
delved exponentially deeper into the
perspective first utilized by Wilfredo
Lam. They restructured the Africaninspired worldviews of those religiouscultural complexities with international
art’s codes. The need to represent one’s
self has been consonant with the need to
become an object, even if via different
optics (each artist does so from his or her
works’ theoretical frameworks). This
allows them to reveal themselves or,
better yet, propose themselves, as
individual beings in which cultural
conflicts, particularly racial ones based
on an inescapable, assimilated, Eurocentric culture like that of the dominant
culture, converge. In the end, these
artists are in keeping with those models.

Juan Moreira, La virgen
del barquito, acrylic-cloth
(2009)

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