IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 107

certain common point on the vision of
life and death, as well as on the spells
and magic acts to achieve success in
battle. Systems of magical-animist
beliefs appeared in the ancient
Egyptians and Greeks, as well as in the
Inca, Maya and Aztec pre-Columbian
cultures.
Delgado went a long way of quests and
influences that began with Wifredo Lam
and continued with the neo-figurative
work of Antonia Eiriz and other artists
who approached the contents of African
cultures, like Miguel de Jesús Ocejo,
Paul Toscano and Arnaldo Rodriguez
Larrinaga (The Group Origin); or
Ramón Haiti, Rafael Quenedit, and
Ever Fonseca (The Antillean Group).
Delgado intention was neither to repeat
what others have done nor to reproduce
icons and symbols of Afro-Cuban cults.
He studied the work of other artists to
formally and conceptually enrich their
proposals with new contents of his own.
He always maintained the friendship
and exchange of views with great artists
who cultivate the Afro-Cuban themes,
as Belkis Ayón, Manuel Mendive and
Santiago Olazabal. However, since the
student years many others considered
his work a rare thing or simply
witchcraft by a black individual.

For him, recalling that first impressions
with the palero friend meant bringing a
vital footprint to his poetic and artistic
discourse. By approaching the practices
—prohibited, proscribed and rejected
during certain time— he could enter the
liturgical ritual and the ways for
preparing religious works, which
remain as inherited and accumulated
secrets due to the mistrust towards
curious people that was generated by
centuries
of
discrimination
and
repression.
In all these stories —hidden in rough
manufactured pots or kettles— he
discovered the most primitive and
essential elements of Black Africa. With
high technical skill, nuanced by a
harmonic palette, he gave artistic life to
items that paleros use to prepare the
pledge or Nganga: skeletal remains (in
which the soul of the dead is
impregnated), elements of the sea and
the rivers (snails, stones, shells),
agricultural and other metal tools,
chains, roots and sticks taken from the
woods. All they form an artistic
discourse within a personal poetics of
love and hate, courage and fear, truth
and lies, loyalty and betrayal

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