Eduardo Roca «choco» (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 1949)

Eduardo Roca «Choco»

Eduardo Roca «choco» (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 1949)

Eduardo Roca «Choco»

– Virginia Alberdi Benítez –

– Art Critic –

Choco, the renowned Cuban artist, shines with his own light. Perhaps not all inhabitants of the Caribbean island know that his name is Eduardo Roca Salazar, but when you say Choco – the familiar name with which he signs his pieces – Cubans understand that you are speaking of a well-known artist. It is not necessary to be familiar with his work in detail or to frequently visit the spaces where he exhibits; in the public domain, beyond the specialized circles, Choco is someone whom everyone admires for contributing to the heart of Cuban culture.

That perception has been forged over time and is supported by the regularity of a consistent artistic output, duly accompanied by reviews and the media. The most influential Cuban critics followed the creator’s work attentively since the beginning of his career. The national television has dedicated programs to him, and a promotional video from a series on some thirty artists from the island has had a significant tenure for years in prime time.

In recent years, two documentaries on his life and artistic career have had notable impact: Choco (2014), by U.S. professor and filmmaker Juanamaría Cordones Cook, and El hombre de la sonrisa amplia y la mirada triste (The Man with the Wide Smile and Sad Glance) (2016), by Cuban filmmaker Pablo Massip.

But the most decisive recognition comes from the forms of interaction that reinforce group appreciation and statements of opinion, originating from Choco’s active participation in Cuban cultural life: not only in activities related with visual arts, but also in other areas of creativity and social events.

It is no coincidence that prestigious writers and intellectuals from various disciplines have issued appraisals of his work and published impressions that endorse a legacy they consider essential for the spiritual heritage of their fellow countrymen.

His participation in salons and biennials, the awards he has received, his mural paintings, the collaboration with dance companies, and the use of his images in shows have contributed to the notoriety of his work and granted visibility to his artistic mark.

To this must be added his early and subsequently growing recognition in international circles. Gallery owners and art collectors were captivated by the artist as he became known in Latin America, Europe, the United States, and Japan.

As if that were not enough, his work and life coherently complement the artist’s personality. The human being and creator merge in a sole entity. This was perceived in the early days by the great poet Eliseo Diego, who in 1976 wrote, “Eduardo Roca has stopped promising and is already a painter from head to toe. But although his feet are well placed on the ground – in his country – and the head is clear and held on high, it is from the heart that his painting emerges.” And it was confirmed in 1999 by novelist, essayist and politician Abel Prieto: “Choco, unlike others, turns a youthful fifty, without bitterness, with his smile intact, delivering his friendship and his work with the generosity of men; of true artists.”

To decode Choco and understand why he is a prophet in his land and in many other places, one must search into his roots, his aesthetic ideas, and the context of his evolution.

One cannot explain the artist without the social and cultural transformations that took place in Cuba after the change of regime in 1959. The opportunities for personal fulfillment for a Cuban of humble origin born in 1949 were limited. His first years were spent in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second most important city, located in the eastern region.

As a child he would draw in the school notebooks. A teacher became aware of his skill and encouraged him to answer a call to train the first art instructors. A school had been opened in Havana that rapidly prepared young people from all over the island with the mission of teaching fine arts, dance, music and theater in cities and countryside, schools and factories, military units and fishing villages. That educational effort in 1961 coincided with the massive literacy campaign that taught tens of thousands to read and write in scarcely eleven months.

After two years Choco graduated as an art instructor in visual arts. He recalls his arrival in Havana with a wooden suitcase and the entrance to the school, located in a luxury hotel in the neighborhood that until a short time earlier had been inhabited by the national bourgeoisie. He was the youngest student, and because of the color of his skin his classmates began to call him “Chocolate”, which was gradually shortened to “Choco”.

Since he was only fourteen years old when he graduated in 1963 he was not legally allowed to work, so he was able to continue his studies at the recently opened National School of Art (ENA), in Cubanacán.

The ENA teaching staff in Choco’s day (he graduated there in 1970) included distinguished representatives of the Island’s artistic vanguard. One of these professors was Antonia Eiriz, who exerted great influence upon the first graduates to whom she transmitted the secrets of the craft and the encouragement to develop their own personalities. Another important artist who taught him was Servando Cabrera Moreno, of whom Choco has said, “Without Servando, neither I nor many of my contemporaries would have arrived at the conceptions on art we have today. Servando greatly widened our expectations as painters.” And although painting was in the center of the training, Choco had already come in contact with printing techniques. This, as we shall see later, was providential for the future development of his career.

From Havana he briefly returned to Santiago de Cuba where he worked as a teacher. He moved back to the Cuban capital in 1973, where he settled and dedicated himself to teaching, first in the San Alejandro Academy, and later at the ENA. In the mid-seventies he began to visit the Experimental Graphics Workshop at the Plaza de la Catedral of Havana, where he developed as an engraver until becoming one of the undisputed masters of the specialty.

The painter from the 1970s became well known for his canvases of popular epic themes shared at the time with several of his contemporaries: anonymous heroes of the sugarcane harvest, peasants tied to their land, landscapes transformed by human sensibility.

Regarding those avatars, two events should be taken into consideration. First, his stay in Angola in 1978 as collaborator of the Cuban Civil Mission in the field of culture, which enabled him to obtain direct knowledge of a reality interconnected to his ethnic origins. In addition, there was the beginning of his international career, particularly his emergence in the United States in 1981, when he shared an exhibition with the painter Nelson Domínguez in San Francisco. This is not fortuitous: Choco is one of most popular contemporary Cuban artists in the United States, even before earning the Grand Prize at the Fourth International Print Triennial of Kochi, Japan in 1999, which undoubtedly increased the value of his work.

Since the 1980s Choco evolved stylistically toward the definitive symbols that characterize his images. In general, a reference to take into consideration was the inevitable influence the New Figuration aesthetics exerted not only on him, but also on the early promotions of artists trained at the ENA.

It is worth mentioning that it was not the assimilation of the European criterion of this trend, which included Irishman Francis Bacon, Frenchman Jean Dubuffet, and Spaniard Antonio Saura, but the proximity to the Latin American trend, led by Venezuelan Jacobo Borges, Mexican José Luis Cuevas, and Argentinean Antonio Berni, among others. The latter, by the way, was promoted in Cuba by Casa de las Américas. In his expressionistic version, the neo-figuratism in the Island reached one of its peaks precisely in the work of Antonia Eiriz.

If our artist shows a connection with certain principles of the New Figuration to some extent and in a tangential manner, that is because when observing his paintings and prints one notices the importance of the recovery of the iconic representation and the relation between the human figure and the construction of the painting space itself.

Unlike the generation of artists who emerged in the 1980s, however, neither Choco nor his generational companions dedicated, even remotely, energy to theoretical discussions. They painted, drew, and printed according to their own expressive needs. And if initially they seemed to respond to a spirit of the times, they went on to choose their paths individually resulting from experiences and personal possibilities. In Choco’s case, these experiences nourished his creative impulses and extracted an essential connection that is present in all his work, which the artist has established with the Cuban nationality.

Choco thinks visually what the island’s major poet, Nicolás Guillén, called Cuban color. Neither African nor European, neither black nor white; the artist reflects the result of a new identity, qualitatively different from the ones supplied by the sources. As Guillén stated in 1931, “To begin with, the spirit of Cuba is racially mixed…” and considered that “From the spirit to the skin will come the definitive color; some day it will be called Cuban color.” From the late twentieth century into the present one Choco has faithfully and masterly interpreted the transition from that anticipation to a latent reality.

That is evident both in the physical features of his human figures and in the skin textures and atmosphere of each composition. To verify this, examine the repertoire of images displayed in ArteMorfosis gallery. The pieces exhibited there have been recreated in impeccable prints, his well-known collagraphs that are true masterpieces. People crowned by birds, fruits, and hats; faces of mineral consistency that glow with earthly colors; women distributed in space; a dancer of irradiating gesture; a Venus that is saved from original sin; each and every one of them on backgrounds of abundant textures. His painting, with figurations related to the ones in his prints show his mastery of this art form. The polychrome sculptures burrow into the wood for the mystery of plant fibers.

From a technical point of view, the viewer of the exhibited works could ignore the difference between painting and engraving, since what matters and impacts is the visual outcome. The artist actually assumes both lines of accomplishment without stopping in watertight compartments. The porous nature of the borders between one and the other form is due to the character and dominion of the collagraphic technique and internalization of the latter’s effects on the painting procedures.

Choco is conscious of that crossing. He admitted to Cuban journalist Estrella Díaz in an interview, “I learned about collagraphy, and when I started working with it I saw that I was actually painting, because the technique fitted perfectly with my way of painting. Collagraphy, because of its possible textures, reliefs, and technique of execution, was a very interesting and very contemporary painting form. Therefore, I did not feel I was printing – I felt I was painting.”

Painting, engraving, sculpture: Choco is one and indivisible. He summarizes ancestral wisdom and unyielding vitality. The Yorubas, one of the ethnic groups that contributed to the formation of the Cuban nationality, have a saying: “I am because you are.” That is the key – alpha and omega, beginning and end – of his work.

Havana, September 2016

Virginia Alberdi Benítez (Havana, 1947) Graduate from the Higher Pedagogic Institute Enrique José Varona, 1970. Art critic, editor-in-chief of Artecubano ediciones. During more than twenty years she was a Specialist in Promotion at the National Council for Plastic Arts (CNAP). During five years she was a senior specialist at the gallery Pequeño Espacio, at CNAP. She has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her texts appear as collaborations in La Jiribilla, Granma newspaper, the tabloid Noticias de Arte Cubano, the magazines Artecubano, On Cuba, Acuarela. She has written texts for catalogues of different artists.
choco-einladung_www_de

Eduardo Roca «Choco»: EQUILIBRIO HUMANO

Keys to an Identity

– Virginia Alberdi –

Choco shines with his own light. Perhaps not all inhabitants of the Caribbean island know that his name is Eduardo Roca, but when you say Choco – the familiar name with which he signs his pieces – they understand that you are speaking of an artist whom everyone admires for contributing to the heart of Cuban culture. That perception has been forged over time and is supported by the regularity of a consistent artistic output.

Eduardo Roca «choco» (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 1949)

Eduardo Roca «Choco» (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, *1949)

The participation in salons and biennials and the awards he has received have contributed to the notoriety of his work and granted visibility to his artistic mark. To this must be added his early and subsequently growing recognition in international circles. Gallery owners and art collectors were captivated by the artist as he became known in Latin America, Europe, the United States, and Japan. In his case, these experiences nourished his creative impulses and extracted an essential connection that is present in all his work, which the artist has established with the Cuban nationality.

He is familiar with the printing technique – particularly collagraphy – and masters it like few others,. Neo-expressionist elements appear in his creation, where the most intense Cubanness is always present. That is evident both in the physical features of his human figures and in the skin textures and atmosphere of each composition. To verify this, examine the repertoire of images displayed in ArteMorfosis gallery. People crowned by birds, fruits, and hats; faces of mineral consistency that glow with earthly colors; women distributed in space; a dancer of irradiating gesture; a Venus that is saved from original sin; each and every one of them on backgrounds of abundant textures. His painting, with figurations related to the ones in his prints show his mastery of this art form. The polychrome sculptures burrow into the wood for the mystery of plant fibers.

Fat Coloured Lips - 2015 - Collagraphy on Paper - 107 x 89 cm

Fat Coloured Lips – 2015 – Collagraphy on Paper – 107 x 89 cm

From a technical point of view, the viewer of the exhibited works could ignore the difference between painting and engraving, since what matters and impacts is the visual outcome. The artist actually assumes both lines of accomplishment without stopping in watertight compartments. The porous nature of the borders between one and the other form is due to the character and dominion of the collagraphic technique and internalization of the latter’s effects on the painting procedures. Painting, engraving, sculpture: Choco is one and indivisible. He summarizes ancestral wisdom and unyielding vitality.

Havana, September 2016

Virginia Alberdi Benítez (Havana, 1947) Graduate from the Higher Pedagogic Institute Enrique José Varona, 1970. Art critic, editor-in-chief of Artecubano ediciones. During more than twenty years she was a Specialist in Promotion at the National Council for Plastic Arts (CNAP). During five years she was a senior specialist at the gallery Pequeño Espacio, at CNAP. She has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her texts appear as collaborations in La Jiribilla, Granma newspaper, the tabloid Noticias de Arte Cubano, the magazines Artecubano, On Cuba, Acuarela. She has written texts for catalogues of different artists.
choco-einladung_www_de

Eduardo Roca «Choco» – EQUILIBRIO HUMANO

 

Choco - EQUILIBRIO HUMANO

Choco – EQUILIBRIO HUMANO – November 4 through December 3, 2016

As the title ‘EQUILIBRIO HUMANO’ suggests, the works of the Afro-Cuban Artist Eduardo Roca «Choco» (*1949, Santiago de Cuba) are characterised by their search for equilibrium of man with himself, nature, his spirituality, his ancestry independent of ethnicity.  His work – whether painting, sculpture or print – is characterised by it corporeality which is formed by the motives as well as materiality.

ArteMorfosis is the first Swiss gallery to display oil paintings, collagraphies and wood sculptures in Switzerland of the international renowned artist.

Master of collagraphy like no other in Cuba, his solid pasting and sensual volumes identify him among his contemporaries as the most advanced among the figurative expressionists with a vocation for abstraction.
Choco is like his painting: delicate and at the same time expansive, penetrated by chiaroscuro and seductive by nature. His seduction compels us to savor his paintings with pleasure, to submerge into the rubber and the cellulose, to find support on the wood and linoleum, on the metal and vinyl. He takes us by the hand to a world where the aroma of tropical fruits, the arms and legs of bodies that mix in their ethnicity are captivating, to affirm the identity values of the island, to help us understand a cosmos he has created with his roots and his blood.
Nobody pretends to decipher the mystery of his painting; it remains submerged in the artist’s heart. But indeed, in his art lies the essence of Cubanness, that forgotten essence; and what was forgotten he rescues with the tools of his talent and sensibility, and to which he grants universal rank.
Choco knows that only art accompanies us on the adventure of transgression and metamorphosis. His work contributes to a better understanding among us as human beings, because in it we discover another road to the kingdom of fantasy we all hope to reach, and where art always leads us; this time by the hand of the great Choco.

Miguel Barnet
Words at the exhibition Abanico de posibilidades (Range of Possibilities), 2004, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana

Surrealism in Cuba?

– By Virginia Alberdi Benítez –

Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban writer of universal hierarchy, was a witness in Paris to the appearance of the surrealism in the European culture of the period between the World Wars. He even wrote articles for the magazine Revolution Surrealiste at the request of André Breton. Being pursued by the tyranny of Gerardo Machado that at the end of the twenties of the last century kept Cuba under his rule, the writer moved to Europe. The French poet Roberto Desnos, affiliated to surrealism, facilitated for Carpentier to move to France. An anecdote, told by Carpentier himself, reveals the nature of the perception that they both had of art and life:

 “One day Robert Desnos and me were walking through the surroundings of the old market of Paris that exists no more; we passed in front of a store that we didn’t know called “Factory of Traps”.  Traps of all class were sold there: to catch foxes, to catch bears, huge traps, mousetraps, in short, all kind of traps for dangerous or harmful animals. And over the sign, two catholic priests wearing their soutanes were looking through the windows of a guesthouse above the store. We immediately took a picture of the scene and published it in the magazine, because that was an authentic pure surrealist picture”

However, Carpentier broke up with surrealism, from its Latin American and Caribbean experience, he started to think about another perspective of the subject.k Then, the theory of the wonderful reality approach was born. In the foreword to his novel “The Kingdom of this World” (1948), he drifts apart from the European current since it did not believe in the wonderful approach “obtained through magic tricks, meeting objects that are not usually met: the old and lying history of the fortuitous encounter of the umbrella and the sewing machine on a dissection table, generating ermine tablespoons, the snails in the rainy taxi, the lion head on the pelvis of a widow, of the surrealist exhibitions”.

For him the wonderful reality “starts to be wonderful in an unequivocal way when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality, from a privileged revelation of reality, from an unusual or especially favorable illumination of the inadvertent ones of riches of reality, from a broadening of the scales and categories of reality.”

It seems pertinent to remember the remarks of Carpentier when considering the incidence of the surrealism in the Cuban art of the XX century. Because in the traffic toward the Caribbean territory, surrealism experienced a decantation and critical assimilation process that in a certain moment, according to the Carpentier logics, gave place to other stages that difficultly qualify, at least approximately, with the European mainstream.

So, many people insist on pointing out the exclusivity of Wifredo Lam as the maximum Cuban representative of the surrealist school. The artist´s own trajectory is in favor of this appreciation.

Lam, son of a Chinese immigrant and a black mother, arrived in Havana in 1916, Lam had been born in Sagua la Grande, a city to the north of the central region of the island. He studied in the academy of San Alejandro from 1918 to 1922; then he got the chance of continuing his training in Spain.

In 1938 he settled down in Paris. There he met Picasso, in his studio on the Grands-Augustins Street. The brilliant Spaniard called him “cousin” and that is how he introduced him to Braque, Matisse, Miró, Léger, Eluard, Leiris, Tzara, Kahnweiler and Zervos. He met Pierre Loeb, the owner of the Pierre Gallery in Paris, where he made his first personal exhibition in 1939.

Shortly before the arrival of the Germans, Lam leavers Paris to travel to Bordeaux and then to Marseille, where many of his friends, particularly surrealist artists, were grouped around André Breton in the Air-Bel Country house: they were Mabille, Char, Brauner, Masson and Péret. From January to February 1941, he illustrated the poem of Breton, FataMorgana. On March 25, Lam and his wife Helena Holzer travelled to Martinique. Breton and Lévi-Strauss also travelled with them. Being retained in that island, Lam becomes a friend of Aimé Césaire.

Finally, Cuba, after almost twenty years of absence. Lam rediscovers his Afro-Cuban roots. From surrealism he moves to another reality closer to his origins. The jungle (1942) is and is not a surrealist work.

The Cuban painter and critic Carlos M. Luis who, by the way, more than once has been considered as a follower of the surrealist trend, has said on the evolution of Lam: “Having as starting point the essence of the pictorial European tradition, as Breton saw, an integration of cultural diverse sources took place in his painting .-the  transculturation that Fernando Ortiz coined in his ethnology works-  where from the symbols of the Afro-Cuban religion to diverse images related with the esoterism and the European demonology are present, as we can see in his works The Wedding (1947) and Belial emperor of the flies (1948).”

Evidently, from the moment he recovered his identity in contact with his native land, the work of Lam stops responding to the approach fixed by Breton in the second Surrealist Manifesto about the prevalence of “a mechanism toward a mental world of infinite possibilities, a moment in the mind where life and death, the real thing and the imaginable thing, the past and the future, the communicable thing and the incommunicable thing, the high thing and the low thing, they stopped to be perceived as contradictions.” Its construction of images is not mental, but visceral.

Apart from Lam it would be necessary to speak at most of surrealist influences in the work of several of the Cuban masters of the vanguards of the XX century. One of the most important was Eduardo Abela.

The Chilean critic Miguel Rojas Mix points out as an interesting fact, in the case of Abela, that his contacts with the European surrealism in the decade of the twenties were only assumed by the fifties, what could be seen in the Hall of the National School of Visual Arts (April, 1950), when he exhibited thirty two pieces that mean the transformation of his painting.

“Rojas Mix revealed: There, what is formal acquires a great importance, but it is not an empty formalism since there the form acquires a symbolic value. From his magic world the social reality or the Cuban world did not disappear. Abela works using texture effects in order to give even more sensitivity to the image. It evokes a magic-wonderful world. It is a magic realism where the reality is seen as fantastic: very lyrical, with nothing anecdotic. In his paintings the space is flat, without illusionism of any kind.”

In a seemingly much more tangential way we can see the bonds between surrealism and the work of another great master of the Cuban painting of the XX century, Carlos Enríquez. His iconography is characterized by the figurative stylization and the masterful use of transparencies. He painted characters and landscapes of unyielding Cuban character. But there were reminiscences of his training stay in Paris. The art critic Luz Merino Acosta has pointed out how the artist’s procedures are close to those of Salvador Dalí when he proclaimed to apply “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical interpretative association of delirium”, and to prove that, he tells us that two of the most celebrated works by Enríquez, The kidnapping of the mulattresses and Creole Hero, seem to illustrate that precept.

In sculpture we find Agustín Cárdenas. Living in Paris from the 50s, his esthetics is close to abstractionism. However he is considered as a partner of the surrealists for participating in the exhibition L’ EtoileScellée Gallery in 1956 and then, in 1965, in the international last exhibition of the survivors of the movement. That sense of belonging is also supported by the opinion of Breton that said of his work: “As skilled as a dragonfly, Cárdenas’s hand, for our fortune, remains in that highly privileged condition. Arising from his fingers there is the flourishing great totem that, better than a saxophone, makes the figure of the beautiful women bend”

Even today, the elements of surrealism arrive to the Cuban art in union with other trends of the art, more contemporary, characters and atmospheres that belong together with the insular idiosyncrasy and that constant union of realities and daily daydreams. 

Havana, summer, 2016