El gran fascista (The Great Fascist) is not the only work by Rafael Zarza in the permanent halls of the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), but it is the most visible by this author born in Havana in 1944. It is, also, a significant creation in various senses. (…)
An allegory on the power of the individual on the mass or the herd, that painting by Zarza has been construed as a satirical denunciation to the dictatorial authority exercised by totalitarian regimes in Latin America and Europe.
(…)But just because of that ecumenical dimension, Zarza’s proposal could also allude to the domestic environment, especially when the “e-mail war” some years ago in Cuba revealed (with names and surnames) the despotic exercise of power of some senior officials in the sector of artistic culture during the Grey Quinquennium. Their aberrant applications on how art should be traumatized him and his agents in the first lustrum of the seventies.
(…) Zarza, who with greater or lesser luck has approached the Hispanic and African roots of Cuban things, who is an exponent of Cubanized pop, who is a referent on the organic integration between visual art and design, who is a paradigm of social criticism with doses of humor and fantasizing, at times is rediscovered by the new generations. It is a fate many artists would want for themselves.
