sábado, 16 de abril de 2016

Angel Delgado in Miami: Amazing adventure at The Fountainhead Residency






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.