Art Talk: Circumstantial Waters

Many times in life external circumstances or chance end up marking our path. So, by pure chance, I came across this exhibition in one of the galleries in the center of the city of Santiago de Cuba. It was one of those times when walking without a precise direction brought good results.

Circumstantial Waters won me over at first sight. Maybe it was the author's style or his palette of colors between the bright and the somber, I couldn't say, but something caught me. From the first piece, and despite the surrealism that it might carry, I could notice two very distinctive elements that would remain in most of the paintings. First, the polar bear, as a strange symbol in this Caribbean panorama, and then a purely Creole element such as a hut.

In the first half of the exhibition, these elements were interspersed to make social criticism in a very intelligent way, introducing the bear in scenes that refer to the Cuban countryside, or using the figure of the peasant in surreal situations that encouraged the public to put together the puzzle of this universe. In the background and as a "closing" of this part, a kind of angel flying between various worlds that seemed to contain alternative versions of the island of Cuba, was the piece that most caught my attention, but that at first seemed out of place with the rest. Something that in the end made all the sense in the world.

The second half also seemed loaded with a lot of costumbrismo, but this time no longer having Cuba as the center, but an ancient and feudal Japan. The bears and the references to Cuba were maintained everywhere as elements that upset reality. But this time in a Japan full of samurai and criollismos that in a certain sense represented the opulence that was lacking in its counterpart, with brighter colors and the absence of a gray shadow that could be noticed in the contrasting first pieces.

As a culminating work, a girl taking a selfie in the middle of many worlds that contained alternative versions of the world and the island of Cuba, seemed the perfect closing for an exhibition that, from subtle ones, contained strong social criticism and questions that revolutionize Cuba today.