Art OnCuba 14

We are fortunately arriving to the fourth year of the publication of Art OnCuba, in an attempt to break with that short-life curse that tradition has imposed on magazines about Cuban art. We are not making promises for this year because, instead promises, we prefer to correspond with facts the favor extended to us by our readers. We merely tell you that we will continue doing everything in our reach for the magazine to give an account of Cuban artistic current events wherever its protagonists are, always paying attention to the memory of all that has made the island’s art grow throughout history. In the same way, from our pages we will continue making visible new signatures of creators as well as of the specialized criticism, where it seems that the obsession that has spread in the media to write about art using an inscrutable language is being left behind.

As on other occasions, Art OnCuba highlights the granting of the National Visual Arts Award, waiting for this distinction to come out of the reduced space of the native soil and to take into account the artists of the same stature who have continued their career in other parts of the world. We have wanted to get together the Elogio a Fors with texts about some young artists currently working based on a relationship with the natural environment, multiplying the views about this subject and exploring increasingly more experimental languages.

Several exhibitions, personal as well as collective, of young people who have started showing their talent and of artists who form part of preceding generations, caught our attention. In that context we are pleased to highlight the exhibition of Los Carpinteros, whose works have been touring Brazil for several months and who recently also had a display in Portugal in the framework of the activities for the designation of Lisbon as the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2017.

With the aim of completing the vision we were contributing in the previous edition about Cuban photography, we include in this issue a text by Cuban photography critic and historian Grethel Morell, who reviews the never published editorial project Con sudor de Millonario, about Cuban deceased photographers Rigoberto Romero and Leovigildo González. Morell extensively explores the period, presents her considerations about the trends of documentary photography and deals with the subject of the sugar harvest in the photographic imagery of the island.

Lastly, we did not want to open a new year of the magazine without extending ourselves on what happened in 2016 with Cuban art with regard to the market, placing special emphasis on the results of the winter auctions in Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips. It’s interesting to follow the trail of this subject that is increasingly outlining certain contradictions between public and private sales of works of art from the island.

OnCuba is celebrating five years, Art OnCuba four. So let’s celebrate.