|
|||||||||||
|
| Virtual exhibitions |
|
||||
| See works | |
| Cuban Post-medieval Painting |
| "The Late Middle Ages’ art and especially the Renaissance and the Baroque’s (two styles that chronologically coincide with the discovery, conquest and colonization of America), is present in one of the trends of the turn-of-the-century Cuban painting: what has come to be known as “post-medieval” painting, some of the characteristics of which are relating its appropriations to the abovementioned artistic styles from the artistic scope of Cuba during the 90s(...) While in regard to its content, the text subverts the reality of the aforementioned time, the strict re-significance of which is always in relation to the one characterizing the present time of the country. Thus, expressions, and very characteristic idioms of the turn-of-the-century Cuban people (the new century began the other day, so to speak), become part of de code of these painting, arranged according to styles like the Romanesque, the Byzantine or the Flemish painting of the Late Middle Ages.
(...) “Defining this kind of painting as “post-medieval” is also an ironic reference to the postmodern names, in a society that does not relinquish the unfinished tasks of the modern age; for instance, the emancipation of man... Havana, like Boccaccio’s Florence, when it acts, thinks there is nothing better than living life or lose it forever to make it grow; subvert something, no matter how small is it, in a moment of transcendental transit, complex and eclectic at the same time, where —sometimes— the marginal is canonized and the canonical is marginalized”. (1) Other characteristics pointed out by Bermúdez are: “Maybe the most defining characteristic... of all the “post-medieval” Cuban painting of the 90s is its cultivated way of doing and saying. With this conception of painting, it is natural that the history of the Western art results favored in any historical–cultural project related to the catalogue of knowledge and experiences of our artists. Surrealism —which never took root in Cuban painting—, now becomes post-medieval art legitimating its insularity in the shelter of a reality that, without scorning dreams and utopias... inserts in the disagreements of an exacerbated sensibility through its struggle against irrationality and crisis. “Dalí, Max Ernst, and Magritte are re-discovered and admired in the painting classrooms... But it is the Renaissance art from Northern Europe (the Netherlands, Germany...) and the Baroque which establish the guidelines, especially in the craft, relocating painting in its enclave modern essential: the easel painting. However, the original work is not the referent, but the art book, the reproduction. A generation of artists that base their work on art reproductions is coming up. The printed matter is still the best fixative. Rather than a great painting, it is an attempt toward it. That is why it wants to do it, but not like an imitation of what has been done already in other illustrious periods in art history, but like something that, in regard to them, has its own objectives and messages. In this way, El Bosco, Brughel, Van Eyck, Botticelli, Cranach, Rubens... are inserted in an organic form in the best Cuban painting tradition to share a beer (canned) with our post-medieval artists, while they explain their world and go beyond, among the lines to buy bread: comets of our daily routine... “This kind of painting is also associated sometimes to an academic turn that, interpreted in a simplistic way, tries to deny strategies of strictly postmodern creation like they are its code recycling (in this case already distinguished, like those in Renaissance or Baroque painting) or its evident citing interest; in other words: its desire to appropriate the already existent to call the attention, an essential characteristic of postmodernism... Today more than ever before, the Cuban painting is linked to the world, and it is part of it. Its maturity is directly related to the links it establishes with the universal art; it is characterized in terms of universality. Our own reality, like everyone’s reality. The Cuban post-mediaeval painting is the most recent proof of it, by being —as it is—, transit, never epilogue, of the best Cuban painting and, at the same time, an opening to its most provocative future possibilities”. (2) Quotes taken from: (1) Jorge R. Bermúdez. Un invitado al paraíso. Opus Habana. Vol. VI. Nº 1. Havana 2002, pages 35-41. (2) Jorge R. Bermúdez. El vértigo de la libertad o la parodia posmedieval de Rubén Alpízar. Opus Habana. Vol. IV. Nº 1. Havana 2000, pages 34-41. |
| CUBARTE 2006 |