Cuban artists, Cuba, Wilfredo Lamb, Raul Cordero, Ernesto Rancaño, Nelson Domínguez, Alexis Leyva (Kcho), Los Carpinteros, Ever Fonseca, Ernesto Leal, Joan Capote

Damián Aquiles
(1972)

Aquiles has obsessively favoured scrap material from the bodywork of old cars or containers of the most varied types to make small walking human figures, or perfectly flattened squares grouped according to an impeccable arrangement. He has not abandoned canvas, however, using a combination of techniques to produce an abstract work where graffiti connotes the emotional impact in the direction that the artist is interested in.

Drawing, collage, painting, installations and objects are vehicles which the artist?a former member of René Francisco's Grupo Dupp?uses to encourage the viewer's active involvement, seized by sensations that go beyond what is traditionally considered as "visual": smells, flavours, sounds. To enhance the physical and sensory qualities of objects in order to mobilize the viewer's perceptive and reflective abilities seems to be the ultimate purpose of this young artist who in the last few years has received international recognition.

Launched to fame after having played the lead in the film Strawberry and Chocolate, Perugorría would mitigate the tedium of the long waits between shoots drawing obsessively on his script. Overcoming some hesitation and reluctance after the successful exhibit of his work, which leans toward expressionism, in Cuba and abroad, and, although this artist claims that he is, above all, an actor, some of his co-stars endeavour to recover the sketches that he discards, perhaps thinking, with foresight, in posterity.

A member of Volumen I, the most radical group in Cuban art of the last decades, he has restored the sacred character of human nature exploring primitive cosmogonies, especially the myths and offices of the Regla de Palo, of Bantu origin, which works with the powers of nature. Whether in his drawings, paintings or altar-installations, with an obsessive recurrence to natural materials, the artist reassess "primitive" essences versus the alienation and arrogance of hegemonic discourses.

Historical and socio-cultural processes and their effects on the individuals who take part in or experience them, and their sexual, religious, ideological and political referents, constitute the foundation of this artists work, which through drawings, sculpture, photography and installations, which are consciously eclectic and transgressive, ironic and allusive to the inevitable kitsch of popular representations, aspire to share obsessions and passions.

His Dürer-like detailed, precise, expressive drawings, in conformity with a personal symbolic language, which does not clash with the subordination that the art of illustrating demands, delves incisively into horror and chaos. His world, suggestive and dreamlike, lyric, yet grotesque, is both our world and the world that is beyond all possible knowledge.

Painting, drawing and engraving, abstraction and imagining, all exist side by side in his work and are mutually permeated and enriched. Centred on the theme of the city and its architectural components—arches, cornices, columns, windows, stairs—with the occasional irruption of elements replete of a strong symbolic value such as fruits, trees or icons from the Yoruba religion, his work has gone from strong colours with a predominance of red, green and blue, to the various shades of ochre and grey.

Captivated by pure shapes and volumes, he has accepted the challenge of making good commemorative art that is highly charged with conceptualism; although he prefers steel, he also works in wood, marble, stone, concrete, bronze or a combination of materials. His expressive synthesis and his elegance are daily admired in his Caballero de París at the doors of the San Francisco Basilica in Old Havana, or the Hemingway that waits to be served his daiquiri at the Floridita Restaurant, or the John Lennon who sits in one of the benches of the park at 17th and 6th Streets in El Vedado.

With a strong presence of ritual and symbolic elements, resorting to the mythology and spirituality of Africa and Pre-Hispanic civilizations of the Americas, his art approached a primitive view of the world, not only to explain the universe and feel part of it, but to clamour for harmony with the nature that is at the base of "mother" cultures. The extraordinary capacity of his installations to shake and move makes this artist, who died at the early age of 32, an essential referent in Cuban contemporary art.

A strict sense of proportion characterizes his pictorial work where vegetation, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic elements are interwoven, marked by thick lines that rigorously delimit the spatial layout. His expressively symbolic paintings go from myths to dreams, assimilate the best part of Cubism, and resort to an iconography of masks and totems associated with African art. His magnificent drawings for different editions of Miguel de Cervantes's The ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha have entered forever in Cuban graphic imagery.