Looking at a painting by Luis Cruz Azaceta

The 'elder of the tribe' of Cuban-American artists began to deal with the theme of the rafter since 1967. Here, a look at one of his most important works.

Luis Cruz Azaceta (Marianao, 1942) is without a doubt the "eldest of the tribe" of Cuban-American artists; the one who has received the most national, continental and European recognition from the generation that came into exile in the 60s. He was educated at a New York art school and has lived off his art for the last five decades. His career owes nothing to the Castro regime's art education or its publicity machine. He has not returned to visit the Island, and until now his work has not entered the collection of the National Museum of Havana.

His visual vocabularies reflect social unrest, turbulence and chaos, a dismembered politics, an identity in flight and a much more complicated and dense reality that assumes the social chaos of his time, beyond the themes of the Cuban diaspora. His work, which has changed stylistic languages over time while maintaining visionary consistency of content, has an important feature in common throughout: a dialogue with the effects of the traumatic experience of Cuban exile as the roots of his social expressionism. .
At first glance his paintings deceive us. They seem so rough, so unpleasant, that we want to look at them quickly and move on. Then we recognize it: his works are practically full of the same figure over and over again. Bulging eyes, hooked nose, mustache, thin body. This is the artist Luis Cruz Azaceta. Unlike other post-World War II artists such as Francis Bacon or José Luis Cuevas, Cruz Azaceta's self-portrait is not a manifestation of twisted narcissism. Cruz Azaceta transforms into all human beings: urban inhabitant, criminal and victim, dictator, AIDS patient, artist lost in a labyrinth, rafter. Of all these characters, it is the raftsman who most movingly represents Cruz Azaceta's condition as a Cuban exile.

Born in 1942 and raised in Marianao, a suburb of Havana, Cruz Azaceta grew up in a middle class struggling to survive. Cruz Azaceta spent a lot of time in his maternal grandfather's carpentry workshop, where he observed the doors, tables and chairs made by his uncles. Young Luis would draw cartoon characters on the remains of wood, these figures would later be cut out by his uncles and Luis would paint them and sell them around the neighborhood. Cruz Azaceta remembers his childhood with affection and joy, full of pleasant moments, which he spent mostly in the streets (when he was not at school or in his grandfather's store), playing ball with his friends. of the.