The Fourth Wall and the Foundations of His Work
I learned about Felipe Dulzaides’s work through a video on which I could not stop thinking, (…) Su rostro en Copenhague (His face in Copenhagen, 2010),1 a color spectrum of a CD reflected on a tree and his father’s music, nothing else. Something I did not entirely understand communicated with me in a strangely intimate way. One afternoon seeing his first video, Following an Orange (1999) (…) I asked him how he had arrived at that approach for doing art. The answer was for me the revelation of a good part of his oeuvre, his personality and his life.
“Like that, just like that, I arrived: I think I was open, and I think there were many things. It was an accumulation of experiences, the experience of emigration, the experience of having studied dramatic arts in the Higher School of Art (ISA), the experience of growing up around jazz through my father. We are speaking about personal things, of having crossed boundaries, and also of formal and aesthetic things, in the sense of working with improvisation. That is where I found a way of doing where I do not plan, what happens accidentally, what surprises me, the action as performance, not performance as in the theater. (…)As a visual artist, he belongs to that group of Cuban artists who were trained in the United States: Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Ana Mendieta, Tony Labat. As they, Felipe has been an artist of his times. His work has taken roots in distant realities and has grown with his life. (…)
- Su rostro en Copenhague (His Face in Copenhagen) is part of the FD>FD project exploring the memory of his father, jazz musician Felipe Dulzaides. It will be exhibited in the Havana Biennale 2015.
