Alberto Casado’s Cuba: Absurdity Gleams in Fool’s Gold
Darrell Hartman
You might say that Alberto Casado, the young Cuban artist who paints on luminescent canvases of recycled glass and aluminum foil, has the aesthetic predilections of a magpie.
He is also a gadfly of some sort. But while politics are everywhere in his work, Casado’s own political attitudes are hard to pin down. Using a rainbow palette that relies on bright, primary colors, Casado–whose first solo exhibition in the U.S. was this June’s "Todo Clandestino, Todo Popular"–articulates the myths and violent realities of modern Cuba with a poker face.
His paintings vary in subject matter, from portraits of national figures (like Fidel Castro and poet José Martí) to colorful, populated frames that recall a children’s book–or perhaps MAD magazine, given the way Casado almost whimsically depicts sufferings like drowning, lynching, and amputation. Though he approaches his subjects with humor and cynicism, Casado also has a genuine respect for the Cuban folk art that so strongly influences his work, as well as the social, political, and economic issues facing modern Cuba.
Casado captures a poignancy in his works, perhaps nowhere more striking than in the diminutive two paintings of beer cans on a blank background. These two works recall Jasper Johns and, less directly, Andy Warhol. Casado’s irony masks tragedy in his depictions: the beer in the second painting is Hatuey, named after a famed Indian chief of the 16th century whose mournful visage makes for a brand logo that is neither bland nor generic.
The action and festivity captured in many of Casado’s paintings, can be unsettling. S.O.S. Maine depicts, with comic verve, the sinking of an American navy vessel that ignited the Spanish-American war in 1898. In it, drowning Cubans and Americans bob in the gun-polluted waters of Havana Harbor while the bow of the Maine erupts in a bubble of flame. Uncle Sam cheers the disaster, popping out of the lower left corner with a sign that reads, "Very good!"
The message here seems rather simple: the sinking of the Maine, which legitimized American aggression in Cuba, has had a longer and more tragic legacy for Cubans than for the Americans who were exhorted never to forget it. What is less transparent, though, is how the artist feels about this fact. Casado’s paintings clearly evince the "critical spirit" the artist himself claims to possess, but what do we make of his tone?
His ambivalence perhaps is summed up best in his attitude towards la bolita. A recurring theme in Casado’s recent work, this traditional lottery game is immensely popular in Cuba despite its illegality, and serves as the main inspiration for the show’s title. Casado has called his compatriots’ fantasies of winning the bolita "absurd and hopeless," and yet he is interested in the role the lottery plays in the "crisis economic situations" to which Cubans are by now well-accustomed. His painting La Buena Pipa characterizes the game’s influence as an effusion of numbers tumbling around the head of a worker as he sleeps. The scene, which features Casado’s trademark fringe of hecklers and other rambunctious onlookers, is not a quiet one. But still, the daydream takes place.
In El Buen Doctor (The Good Doctor), for example, four enormous hands float around an operating room in which a surgeon has just performed an amputation. Each hand represents a verb: to work, to struggle, to steal, to escape. What is less obvious, however, to anyone who doesn’t play la bolita, is the meaning of the "80" the doctor holds in his non-cutting hand. And just who is this doctor, anyway? One feels at times that looking at "Todo Clandestino, Todo Popular" is like perusing a children’s book with the text removed.
As the show’s title suggests, there is plenty in Casado’s work that is beyond the grasp of the average western viewer. His liberal use of allegory does not provide clear lessons for a viewer, but actually complicate things. Casado’s cartoonish style and explicit symbolism make his art appear, childishly simple. In reality, his paintings are teeming with local jokes, subtle references, and other secrets and gotchas; they gleam in fool’s gold.
Using a technique he describes as "painting on glass with transparent colors that are illuminated by a layer underneath of crumpled, textured aluminum foil," Casado makes popular art with an immediate visual appeal. That the style he has embraced was, as he explains in an interview in the program notes, "initially considered kitsch or tacky by elite artistic circles" almost goes without saying. But it serves as a useful reminder that one man’s junk is another man’s fodder. And that the man who’s finding art in the dumpster is doing more good than the one who puts it there.
