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From Camaguey: women who fly

You are not born but you become a woman" Simone de Beauvoir
"Art is the philosophy that reflects a thought" Antonio Tapiès

Recognized for the quality of their events, Nobarte Inc. produced one of the most transcendental homages for the Cuban community and specifically for the Camagueyans who emigrated to South Florida. Sponsored by the Koubek Center of Miami Dade College, on March 23, several art events took place in its halls, with an exhibition of four artists from the Cuban visual arts, dedicated to the 200th birthday of the writer from Camaguey, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, and also to the 500th anniversary of the founding of the town of Santa Maria del Puerto del Principe (1514-2014).

Close to the images of the Middle Ages, the artist Maydelina Perez Lezcano (1972) represented with fine and detailed brushstrokes the sinuous and interwoven contours of her images. Thus, she decorates her miniatures loaded with symbols and legends, faithful to her femininity. She desecralizes the religious discourse, placing women in a privileged place, resulting in a strong questioning of the philosophical and theological patterns that prevail today. She breaks with the established canons of the past, rewriting and illuminating her true history.

It is the work of Isabel de las Mercedes Guerra (1922-2002) evidence of a naive painting, far from the academy, and of all artistic ties, free and carefree. Attached to her "camagueyanidad", she reveals in her paintings the magic that surrounds her beloved terroir, exhibiting her palms, the warm colors and the convoluted streets.

On the other hand, confronts us, sometimes aggressively, sometimes with the furtive touches of the infants, the work of expressionist attachment of the artist Alejandrina Silveira (1945). The defiant faces emerge from an eroticism that tends towards abstraction, in sinuous ranges of blues, ochres and greens. It is not a coincidence to find a varied proposal, since her exhibition covers the nineties of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century; so we can see how her expressionist figuration becomes an abstractionist.

It is at this point, where the artist's work converges, since the represented woman occupies the leading role from different angles, which in the arms of the sculptor and painter Martha Jimenez (1948) achieves a social connotation, typical of her aesthetic and philosophical perspective. The works chosen by the curator discuss controversial topics such as emigration, loneliness, uprooting, memories, prejudices about women and women's challenges.

Cuban art -and specifically the art from Camaguey- have a wide range of examples that address the subject of women as a gender, as well as their social, sexual and human function. In this sense, the proposal of Nobarte is valid, because is a tribute to the woman of Camaguey. These works are the invaluable and imperishable sample of the different visions, from four specific and individual points, of the woman of the late twentieth and early nineteenth centuries. These excellent artists dialogue and converse in a same space, far from their land and their creative area, which does not imply that their ideas, artistic expressions and meanings, are far from the public that observes them here, because from Camaguey are those looks that discover and scrutinize every detail.


Author: Msc. Leydis Izaguirre Jerez
Published in Caritate. Revista de Arte y Cultura de la Fundación APOGEO, page 14, Number 04/05, Year 2014.