However many rocks might we leave unturned here are a few thoughts regarding Cuban Art histories. They all negotiate visibly or invisibly with the fear identity we (cubans) inherit from the government. Fear identity in that if the individual is not in agreement with the government they become a criminal. These objects and hence the creators are my family in many ways. As fellow humans, as sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. It is a large family and not all are here: Some are dead and some are alive and with all of them I share the freedom of Art.

The family is scattered across the planet. The Age of Art has barely begun.

The artefacts gathered here are memories, objects charged with riddles, secrets, magical beliefs, historical interpretations, etc. Each object is a unique and individual rendering of the totality each maker embodies as an individual and collective when the works were made, although the works continue evolving with History and identities.

There are many individual styles, each with its own language of expression, trying to leave a cultural legacy struggling to break free from a dying culture of fear simulation and its aftermath. Some artefacts are freer than others - depending on the specific historical moment in which they were created.

Questions of style, of make belief, the innumerable histories that are constantly appearing in the collective and symbolic imagination are the very nature of art’s individual magnitudes existing all at once.

Here is to the freedom of Art that artists want for Cuba and all dictatorships.

Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández, January 7 2025 at 11:49 am.

Arturo Cuenca’s Poster for exhibition, 1987.

Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, Untitled, 19?

Arturo Cuenca, Estetica de la Moda, 19?

Tomas Sanchez, 1971 with Juan Francisco Elso 1986

Ricardo Brey, from the series: La estructura de los mitos, 198?

Poster for Ensayo Sobre America, Juan Francisco Elso Padilla 198?

Arturo Cuenca, Conocimiento: Calle Horizonte, 1981

Tomas Sanchez, En el paisaje interior, 20?

Poster for Tatuaje, with drawings by Jose Bedia and texts by Orlando Hernandez, 1986

Leandro Soto, poster for exhibit “Asi es como es” 19?

Spectrum

Boundaries between art and life are constantly being negotiated.

To say by whom or what is to reduce, to categorize, to turn into speech.

Whatever happens to human understanding can only be thought as a moving threshold

Language and image turning into each other

Living language and living image turning and pushing ad infinitum bodies.

Artists are always found in between structures and systems they can’t control but use as the natural state of being.

To unlearn ways, cultures, and systems is the natural way.

But the process is not orderly. Human understanding and experience is complex and difficult to apprehend outside of desire. To desire (in its infancy) is to objectify, to embark on a process of active understanding. Human action is an active and passive translation of subjective and objective states that physically engages with the object of desire. The sexual pulse is on everything for as long as the human experience is alive and its life has many planes and dimensions, some higher and some lower depending on the human experience of spirit. Notions of immediacy, of direct or indirect desire - subordinated, conscious and or unconscious - are the natural processes of human experience in all its variations.

Writing history is but the history of examples and consists of highlights of the most relevant and useful knowledge for humanity from a myriad of perspectives, hence the historian as a researcher, discoverer, etc. Gadamer’s truth and method is a mandala of what I am referring to here. I am is a space, a threshold that can only be felt with the danger  of categorizing it.  To categorize is to box, to reduce, to make portable - a futile task that certain artists understand very well. Languages as ways of doing are born in practical systems (ideological state apparatuses) in which what is at stake is the livelihood of the human being. Between necessity, desire and all psychological development, the human being experiences her/his life.

Through feelings of kunstwollen travels the artist consciously or not. The danger seems to be giving up understanding for belonging, a door to automatism, ideological brainwashing, conscious and/or unconscious suffering, etc.

Shared humanity converges in the domain of poetry.

The poetic imagination arrives the fastest as if through a black hole, a bursting star, a galaxy or a cluster of universes. In the poetic imagination converges individuation which has become popularized and mythologized by the school of Carl Jung. In the most strict solitude of the artist, the process of the poetic imagination exists as a seed or bloom that can take a myriad ways and one that has been (un)mythologized by certain historical practices. They are bread crumbs that guide us to a certain individual experience traversed by the public - a breaking that leads to the human experience of transcendence; a type of collapse that can be sustained in space to positive or negative outcomes within the human experience in its broadest sense.

In the study of human knowledge the experience appears as an encounter and remembering of  one or many living experiences outside of the domain of mind that re-engages mind bound to the knowledge of such experience. A life  is an individual and collective translation into the shared drama of humanity. The process is individual and subject to enantiodromia, which further complicates the experience depending on levels of conscious and or unconscious existence (living).

It could be linked to a remembering or imprinted as an experience that it can have different lights and darknesses, it could crystallized or exist in constant transformation (formations). Humanity wears itself in its labyrinth searching for clarity and certainty amid impermanence, until the inside and the outside collapses or it is remembered that it collapsed a long time ago.

The process to quiesce the mind is a  type of journeying that unbinds, sometime one and or other, in solitude or with people. The process is always subject to contingency and sometimes difficult to abide or comprehend depending on desire relations and the typical mind processes of imprinting, overprinting, super imprinting engagements as so many languages of sexualities, identities, embodiments, disembodiments, etc.

The human body is a Camera Lucida in which the play of imprints relies on the mastering of languages. A process full of variations and contexts of understanding. Mastering and understanding is but a process of erasures until the mind is not and the Self is realized. An experience appearing at once in all united domains: sexual, emotional, intellectual, and physical a panacea full of variations from experience to experience and from individual to individual.

Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández 17125