Cuban artist Angel Delgado (Havana, 1965) was recently awarded The
Fountainhead Residency / Miami for the month of April 2016. During a visit to
the studio where he is working, I could see the value and dimension of the
works in progress. This is a large group of sculptures and objects based on a
central theme very typical of his creative career: the human head.
The artist has created serialized and standardized heads in plaster of
Paris. A legion of humans prefabricated without defined facial features, which
seem to come out of a mass-cloning factory. Heads and faces that intrigue us because
of their cold presence, due to their silence and irremediable isolation. Men or
women with appearance of androids, connected to electrical devices, trapped in
glass containers or under the pressure of heavy bricks. What we can see is a terrible
physical homogenization that certainly speaks about the homogenization of
thought and egalitarianism of ideas.
These individuals, attached to common objects like clothes hangers, chains,
etc., disturb us by their indifference, their skeptical and incredulous
presence. They represent a cry of protest, a warning about our loss of
spiritual and human values. They are suspended in a strange temporal and
spatial circumstance. They are the bane of our consciences. The nightmare of
our civilization.
In short, excellent works by one of the most courageous and sincere
Cuban artists of the past 25 years, whose mythical performance "Hope is
the last thing we have lost" (1990) still remains in the memory of all
Cubans, wherever they are, marking a before and after in the history of Cuban
art.
These individuals, attached to common objects like clothes hangers, chains,
etc., disturb us by their indifference, their skeptical and incredulous
presence. They represent a cry of protest, a warning about our loss of
spiritual and human values. They are suspended in a strange temporal and
spatial circumstance. They are the bane of our consciences. The nightmare of
our civilization.
