Cuban Surrealism

October 30, 2024October 30, 2024 Staff

A New Exhibit at Cernuda Galleries is an Eye Opener

One of the great art movements of the 20th Century was surrealism, which developed in Europe after World War I. The aim, said founder André Breton, was to meld the “contradictory conditions of dream and reality” into a super reality, or surreality. Think of the fantastic imagery of Salvador Dali’s melting clocks, or René Magritte’s rooms with walls of cloud-filled skies.

Other movements sprang from surrealism, including Dadaism in France, Cobras in Scandinavia, and Magical Realism in Latin America. It is from the latter movement that the latest exhibit at the Cernuda Arte Gallery derives its energy, in a fantastic display of some 180 canvases and sculptures by Cuban artists.

Surealism, says gallery owner Ramón Cernuda, “really changed the way people look at art and created art going beyond what was real, going beyond what was romantic, going beyond what was abstract. It was a combination of all of those things and much more. It was an imagination running wild.”

The Cernuda Gallery has now grown to three buildings on Ponce, just south of the Plaza and Ponce Circle. If it were not a gallery it would be a museum – and operates as such during the hours of 10 am and 6:30 pm Monday to Friday, and Noon to 5 pm Saturdays. Of course, unlike a museum, all the art works are for sale – and in this case run the gamut from $6,000 for a small painting by Vincente Hernandez, to a 1943 painting – “Danze Afrocubano” – by Mario Carreño Morales for $5 million.

On display are many remarkable works, not the least of which are a half dozen paintings by Wifredo Lam, the most collectable of Cuban artists. While most of these are more abstract than surreal, they reflect the years Lam lived in Paris after fleeing Franco’s post-civil war Spain – a city where he spent time with both Breton and Pablo Picasso. For pure surrealism there are the wonderful ghostlike characters in paintings by Mendive, and the dystopic, futuristic Tower of Babel with its layered circles of tilting architecture by Hernandez, entitled “The Arc, the Tower and Mount Ararat.”

Of great interest are the sculptures, in particular two by Roberto Fabelo. One is a bronze of various heads of men and animals clumped together in a kind of carousel. The other is of a naked woman whose figure is decorated with small rhinos. “In his world the rhinos symbolize the male,” says Cernuda. “He’s picking up from Boticelli [the female figure] and these rhinos that represent the male figure are all over the beautiful body of the woman.” This statue was one of a series of nine, one of which sold at Christie’s for $500,000.

Another canvas is by the famous landscape painter Thomas Sanchez, simply titled “Landscape.” It portrays a pristine island in the distance with the foreground jammed with the menacing litter of civilization. “He typically does these very romantic, almost sublime landscapes,” says Cernuda. “But this one is about stress, the tension between the garbage that is attacking and the island.”

Perhaps the most dramatic painting is one by Fabelo entitled “Havana Gothic,” a large black and white canvas showing a demonic half naked woman riding a giant dog with a large red tongue. It is a dark reflection of the Cuban dictatorship (with an escape “float” in the foreground), as is another work by Tomás Esson, a 1994 painting called “Rapunzel,” in which the dictatorship is portrayed as a king of part bull, part human monstrosity.

And then there is Mendive, whose works speak of Santeria and the lukuwi religion, an aspect of surrealism that is very much Cuban. “Another thing that magical realism incorporates into surrealism is the African influence, which you don’t see with Breton. There was no acceptance of that religious aspect of the surreal until Lam arrived to the movement, because Lam brought all of those African religious values into his creations – and then Mendive continues that path.”

Cernuda Arte Gallery
3155 Ponce de Leon Blvd.
305.461.1050