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Humberto Castro. The Enchanted Forest, 2008. Oil on canvas. 58 x 79 in. (147,3 x 200,6 cm.).
  

  Solo Show
Humberto Castro
ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Gallery
Issue #71 Dec - Feb 2009
United States, Miami
Institution:
ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries

Janet Batet


Much has been said about the close connection between the work of Humberto Castro and Cuban reality, the imperative desire to leap, the vortex of the lived and the dreamt, the apprehended and the hidden. In it we see a confrontation of borderline situations and chronicles where Man emerges alone with his monsters, fears, desires, and chimeras.
ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Gallery (169 Madeira Avenue, Coral Gables, Miami) delighted us in October with Fábulas contemporáneas, a show encompassing the most recent period of creation in Humberto Castro¿s career. In the Fall of 2006, the same gallery had presented for public consideration the first retrospective of Castro¿s work, a summary of the artist¿s career that, seen now from afar, functioned as the necessary compendium before setting off in a new direction.
Humberto Castro¿s formative years are part of an unprecedented movement for renovation in Cuba¿s visual arts. The 1980s Generation, as the movement is known inside and outside Cuba, rebelled against Manichaean notions of identity marked by orthodox symbolism, which dominated artistic discourse in the island.
In a first period of explorations and discoveries, Castro¿s work ranges from monochrome silk-screening, where he became a master of distillation and of human figures, to the vibrant, flayé style that distinguished him in the second half of the 1980s, where neo-expressionist features unveiled the violence of the contemporary world.
After arriving in Paris (1989,) Castro explored metaphors and the force of myths. Thus appeared the series Signos del Zodíaco, where Man, finally, is freed from the limitations imposed by physical borders and enters the cosmos to be reborn ad a generic man. The artist explores the signs, shapes, and metamorphoses of that body, which is definitely a receptacle now, the despairing continent of the human tragedy.
Signos del Zodíaco gave way, in 1993, to a period of ochre-hued reds where synthesis and elegance, economy of resources and effectiveness speak of a mature and seductive proposal. The depurated space welcomes the figure, a svelte profile, the prefigurating trace of a voluptuous and tragic inner world. These can be said to be dreamscapes dominated by remembrance, nostalgia, and longing. It is an atmosphere impregnated with a telluric halo that reinforces the allegorical meaning of this period.
In the second half of the 1990s, the artist begins to move towards recounting. Space becomes protagonic in the work. Figures cease to be introspective, even becoming propositive.
His arrival in Miami in 1999 meant a return to narrative: the artist is confronted with his past and memory. The island becomes a leit motif, and so does the sea. The need to narrate or to recount drives the artist to create sequences, parallel actions. New symbols support Castro¿s work during this period, with a discourse that now more than ever deals with men and their land, men and their original space, men and their memory.
Fábulas contemporáneas is a new turn in Humberto Castro¿s production. In the last two years his work seems to move away from myth, at least in the most traditional sense. Icarus and Taurus give way to beings that are no less mythical, but more contemporary. An obsession with machinery and the element of locomotion imposes itself. Small planes, helicopters, boats, tanks, fuse with the human element to generate a new subject that can only be understood from the present.
The idea of the labyrinth ad uncertainty continues to be a constant, and so does the individual left to his fate, alone with himself. El bosque encantado (oil on canvas, 2008) presents a being that is half tree, half person. Arranged in the center and surrounded by similar beings, it seems to discourse about cultural otherness. Immobile, at the center of the composition, this being is tied to the earth. Only his torso enjoys a human aspect. He can see and think his useless hands struggle in emptiness. Around him, as in a Shakespearean fatefulness, human-limbed trees approach, interrogate, but don¿t understand. This simile appears time and again in the show.
Also included in the exhibition is Babel (oil on canvas, 2008,) whose poetics reinforces the issue of migration and the idea of the journey. A suitcase appears here as a symbol of cultural baggage, of memory and identity as shapers of the individual. Too heavy a ballast to carry, too loved a weight to forget.
An identity that reveals us a others in the face of time in-communicates us, separates us, and condemns us.
Pursuing this idea of baggage, the artist presented also during the month of October the parallel show New Cities, at the Allen Sheppard Gallery in New York City. There the suitcase became a constructive archetype, pathway and wall at the same time.
Situated in the Diaspora and the interminable human journey, between past and present, between I and the other, memory and longing, these two shows are a necessary complement for each other. The fact that they were held in different places emphasizes the idea of dismembering, to which we are becoming more and more accustomed. Havana, Paris, Miami, New York, it¿s all the same in the end. Each latitude becomes a point of transit, references to a journey that never ends and shapes us over time. There remains, however, as a last refuge and certain claim on who we are: our baggage.

 


 

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