Lancelot Alonso (*Havana, 1986)

Lancelot Alonso graduated in 1997 from the José Antonio Díaz Peláez Experimental Center for Visual Arts, where he finished elementary school. He continued his studies at the FIT School of Design in New York in 2005 and at San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, where he graduated in 2008. He lives and works in Havana.

– Virginia Alberdi about Lancelot –

‘For strong emotions, we have the work of Lancelot Alonso. On one occasion he was asked about his favorite themes and answered: “I think an important moment was that of my graduation thesis. I sat down to think. The thesis obliges you to develop a theme. I said to myself: ‘I’m not interested in doing what postmodern US Americans did, all that reflection on the problems of art… Among the ‘national’ themes, I am not interested in talking about emigration, marginality, either… until I stopped giving thought to it. I am an erotic, sensual guy. There’s the way.’”

Behind this direct and casual pronouncement, there lies much work and soul-searching. From what has been said to what has been done there is a great stretch that the spectator travels with the endorsement of more than a few accumulated experiences and references.

Indeed, Lancelot’s painting ranks within the extensive range of erotic themes, of which there is a narrow, but relevant tradition in 20th century Cuban visual arts. A few creators from the island could have endorsed Lancelot’s words: “I’m an erotic, sensual type.” But there are notable differences.

In that past, there is a line that goes from Carlos Enríquez to Servando Cabrera Moreno and ends at Zaida del Río and Ernesto García Peña. Eros and lyricism join in that trajectory. But in the more recent past, we witnessed a rupture that, in turn, involved a different kind of initiation: Eros versus lyricism, or, in other words, Eros and sexuality. There is no longer a need to hide the dark object of desire; the eroticism is shown, not suggested. As a milestone between both trends, a name appears in Cuban art: Umberto Peña.

As curator Máximo Gómez Noda has pointed out, this has been happening on a global scale from the second half of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st century; when the erotic-sexual theme reached its highest point with regard to diversity of forms of expression and typologies, widening the possibilities of approaches that eliminate prejudices, schemes and offering a new evaluative view.

However, while for many of the emerging Cuban artists from the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, eroticism conveyed precocity, transgression, provocation, and political-social intentions. Confronting the thematic production of Tomás Esson, Ciro Quintana, Lázaro Saavedra, Elio Rodríguez and Pedro Vizcaíno – Lancelot’s perspective stops at the inherent reflection of sexuality.

Bodies, gestures, and postures exhaust in their own and strict sense. When the artist narrates, the chronicle is self-sufficient, eliminating oblique readings or hazardous solutions of continuity. He admits Rocío García’s influence, more in the formal compositional level than in the conceptual one – perhaps no other artist in Cuba has revolutionized both the pictorial inquiry about the relationship between Eros and power in painting. But a closer approach to voyeurism may be present in the revaluation of sexuality in the bodies of the work of Russian-US American artist Anna Demovidova.

The most interesting aspect about Lancelot, because it causes conflict in the resolution of the compositional elements, is the fact that his images are sustained on a base of color. His chromatic palette is overflowing and feverish like the fauvists’, but without involving premeditated sophistication.

Lancelot has greater interest in resembling himself rather than his era, although he will inevitably continue to be an artist of the time he was born into. In the works exhibited in this exhibition he maintains the violence of color, but the stories contained in them are less aggressive, with perhaps a more romantic touch. ‘

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Adislén Reyes  (*Havana, 1984)

Adislen Reyes attended San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts until 2005 and finished her studies at the Higher Institute of Art in 2010. She has taken part in the following workshops: Artist’s Book, with Steve C. Daiber in San Alejandro (2011); Lithography, in San Alejandro (2003); Collography, with Janet Brossard and Norberto Marrero; The Multiple Trace, at ISA (2002), and Collagraphy, with José Contino, in San Alejandro (2001). She is currently a professor at San Alejandro Academy. She lives and works in Havana.

– Virginia Alberdi about Adislen Reyes –
‘Adislen has said about herself: “My work starts from a hedonistic view of the world and art, hence the careful formal details and the fact that I highlight beauty above the other elements. However, my work is permeated by subtleties, that indirectly exposes other concepts, often using as a tool, the relationship of opposites. I relish different clichés, and through their saturation try to achieve a more cynical vision of reality. Emptiness, superficiality, lack of definition, decoration, and craftsmanship are some of the elements that appear repeatedly in my work.”

We must believe her, but not stop at this confession. In the face of her work, let us separate the dialectics between formalism and conceptual questioning, between clichés and originality, between hedonism and intellectual intensity. One observes in her painting the pretension of masking behind a soft-toned and apparently aseptic patina – in truth, seasoned with elements that habit has classified as decorative themes – fables about the human adventure.

The tiny figure, that mischievous girl who almost always appears in her compositions, is a pretext for a permanent confrontation with the narrative environment in which she moves, with ambiguous but consistent references to the loss of innocence, the fragility of existence, forbidden sexuality, disappearing dreams, and sentimental helplessness.

Everything is decided on the basis of scenarios arranged for representation, which are not offered to the eye as finished proposals but as deliberately muted insinuations. In this operation, which denotes sensible intelligence and mental planning, lies the originality of Adislen’s work.

As I examine her paintings carefully and joyfully, I find a contrasting analogy between Adislen’s work and the passion that moved Lewis Carroll to invent Alice in Wonderland. The English mathematician and writer, according to André Breton, saw himself trapped “between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason, on one side, and between a sharp poetic conscience and the rigorous professional duties, on the other.” With her painting, the young Cuban artist tries to go beyond an illusory perception that leads to complacency (the drowsiness, one could say, of Carroll’s faith) and induce us to explore, in a poetic state, consciously or unconsciously, on which the observer and not the painter must pronounce.

In this regard I share the opinion of Josuhe H. Pagliery, who warned about Adislen: “The use of a child’s imagery, more related to the world of illustration or graphics, solidifies the certainty that the world she shows us does not result from gratuitousness or the mere aesthetic whim; it was consciously selected to consolidate in the spectator a pressing sensation psychologically close to expectation. And it is precisely that visual stillness that makes us glimpse such a feeling, the unfinished drama of such micro situations that do not end or even occur at all.” Each one of the pieces now exhibited by Adislen has been touched by the sprite of a calculatedly insidious lightness that invites us to tread a minefield of poetic grace. ‘