Fordismo (Fordism), Los reyes del mundo (The Kings of the World), Un lago de sangre (A Lake of Blood), among other images with more than one name and that perhaps can only be called by the generic title of Nuestro tiempo, are usually displayed in the graphic memory of those who think on Marcelo Pogolotti’s drawings (Havana, 1902-1988). A visual imaginariness that this exponent of the Cuban historical vanguard developed while taking position among the Turin futurists: a repertoire of formal solutions so diverse and experimental that confused some connoisseurs. (…)
He conceived Nuestro tiempo (Our Time) in the antipodes of Marinetti’s pro-fascist ideology and gave it that title because it summarized “all the social aspects of the moment.” In some drawings he grasped wage-earning industrial work; in others, strike, working class protests; in these, the community of money, of the capitalists; in those, the fight between both poles… (…) Pogolotti, who in surreal and very lineal paintings as Amor en líneas funcionales (Love in Functional Lines, 1931) associated eroticism with flows from the subconscious, in other proposals showed sexual relationship in an unprejudiced and daring way. (…)
So, Pogolotti not always drafted workers as exploited or fighting against capitalism. An excellent dancer, especially of tangoes, in the thirties he made drawings with a “festive” thematic. In some he included political-social allusions and welcomed “Afro-Cuban” elements, thus establishing a relationship with sugar production in the country. (…)
