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A diverse group of ‘Cuban Prints’ at Benson Hall Gallery
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
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Art from Cuba is getting its fair share of attention in Providence right now. It is a prominent component of the "Islas Naciones: New Art from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Diaspora" exhibition at the RISD Museum of Art (through January 30). In addition, a traveling presentation simply titled "Cuban Prints" is being showcased across the street at a gallery in Benson Hall, where the RISD printmaking department is housed. On display are a selection of 35 prints from an exhibition of 75, curated by Benigna Chilla, a professor of visual arts at Berkshire Community College. The show goes on to the Massachusetts College of Art in January. "This group of artists is diverse in age but shares a commonality in creating a narrative expression of their current life in Cuba," Chilla writes in her foreward to the show’s catalogue, which reproduces 18 of the prints. "They speak through a poetic, political, humorous or religious visual language, conveying to us their frustrations and trying to break away both physically and viscerally from their everyday." Those four categories she lists encompass a broad but comprehensive spectrum of artistic endeavors. Presumably the prints on display at RISD are the strongest representations from the works by 17 artists that she selected for the larger exhibition during a sabbatical in Havana last spring. Criticizing the government is bound to be a tricky proposition in an authoritarian regime. But that is finessed in some works here by merely lamenting conditions — especially deprivations — and letting the viewer assign blame to the US embargo, if they choose. Ambiguity in competent art usually implies depth of expression rather than vacillation. For example, Julio C. Pe–a Peralta conveys apolitical ennui by populating the musicians of his black-and-white woodcuts, some wearing Rastafarian dreadlocks, as skeletons. Sandra Ramos’s "La Incapacidad de Atrapar (The Incapacity to Capture)" comes across as ontological rather than political commentary. Individual images, sequenced differently in the catalogue and on the walls, depict outstretched open hands holding objects that include an ocean wave, a castle, city buildings, a mountain, a river spilling down and, almost parenthetically, a ladder and an airplane. We can make of that what we will, but getting away has to be part of our formulation. Images of escape are more prominent in the woodcuts of Alejandro Ramon Sainz Alfonso, in the form of paper airplanes sailing out of open windows. And the series by Yamelis Brito Jorge titled "La Sociedad Perfecta (The Perfect Society)" all but howls its complaint in some of its images of dislocation against a heart-centered doily pattern. Among them, "Bajo Prohibiciones" has the silhouette of a man walking amidst traffic barricades, the content of his black speech balloon left to our imaginations. One image requires explanation, to avoid reversing its intentions. "La Inmortilidad," a lithograph by Josˇ Angel Toirac, is comprised simply of the name "Fidel" smeared in paint on blank paper, the choice of the color — blood red — suggesting political blasphemy. However, rescuing the work from misunderstanding is an accompanying photograph of a similar image being carried in a demonstration, with the explanation that someone wrote the name in blood on his door during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Except for a couple of Madonnas by Lazaro Saavedra, one of whom is a visitation in a boat, no religious imagery made the cut for the RISD selections, which is also the case for the humor classification cited by curator Chilla. That is unless you count the etchings of Dania Fleites Diaz, in which a tree sports breasts and a plant sprouts a penis; but the hearts dangling by strings from the branches are hardly of the valentine variety. Poetical visual language is the last on the curator’s list, and this is plentiful among these otherwise abbreviated selections. Diaz not only is a graphical Ginsburg, but also a surrealist with the imagery in "Adan y Eva," in which a sleeping Adam, naked but draped, lies on the ground next to an Earth Mother Eve whose legs attenuate to root-like thinness. Vulval and phallic shapes surround them on the fertile landscape. Visually compelling images seduce the eye here at least as compellingly as the politically engaging elements. Max Delgado Corteguera’s "Homenade Postumo A La Paz De Las Pipas (Posthumous Homage to the Peace of Pipes)" combines faces of Native Americans with a foreground peace pipe in an arresting way that can only be diminished by description. Of course, that is the strength of any exhibition with as many strong works as collected here.
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