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.

With measured Expressionism, his enquiries into the essence of the Cuban national identity have made use of characteristic aspects of African and Spanish religions using fragments of discarded objects, corroded metals, wood or fibre for his "indoor" works, while privileging ferrocement for his monumental pieces, usually associated with architecture for tourism. In both forms, his technical virtuosity, formal rigour and profound humanistic sense are all notable.

The pioneer of video-art in Cuba is a creator of ideas, and those ideas define the ideal vehicle of expressing them: painting, video, photography, installations. His art leaves the viewer with the experience of solving?or not?the problems posed by the work of art, of taking it in only as a result or embarking on the adventure of unraveling a complex structure of actions not without difficulties and even traps set by the artist, ready to engage in dialogue with centuries of tradition, of technical and conceptual inquiries, of spectacular leaps and seeming or actual backward movements.

Self-taught, beginning in the 1950s, he went from expressionism to abstraction and became a leader of pop-art, his most widely-known period, with paintings that combined historical figures with youthful and radiant ordinary men and women. He also made an important contribution as a designer of books and posters.

His incursion into a multiplicity of means of expression?painting, engraving, ceramics, installations, just to mention a few?is led by an agglutinating element: humour, which he uses to parody with surprising technique certain paradigms of high culture as well as digging into complex, almost absurd, situations of everyday life in the Island. In the words of the artist, 'Quotations, appropriations and parody.intertextuality, the fusion of genres, have all enabled me to discourse on life from a humorous perspective.'

Through vehicles such as drawing, painting, sculpture, installations, and performances, this artist has examined intensively the mechanisms of creation, marketing and socialization of art, a constant feature of his work, which is self-reflective, metaphoric, introspective, bringing into question the difficult and sometimes debilitating links between man and art/society. Through the collaboration and complicity of disciples or colleagues, his projects have aimed always at delving into the creative process.

An obsessive search for all things Cuban is this painter's regular feature: interiors, exterior views of the city, popular festivities, mythological beings and female faces. The use of impasto, baroque ornamentation and exultant chromaticism are his favourite means for expressing the national feeling.

Wholly committed to abstract art?which has appeared sporadically during the course of Cuba's visual arts?he conceives painting 'as a kind of symphony with low sounds, high sounds, luminous sections and somber sections' capable of transmitting or giving rise to sensations or moods. His beginnings as an engraver gave way to a preference for a type of painting that has the ability of combining automatism and intuition with a measured sense of proportion and harmony, as well as an exquisite perception of contrasts, luminosities and textures.

A leading figure of Cuban sculpture, with equal mastery she undertook both gallery and environmental sculpture and is the author of exquisite emblematic works in Havana, such as, Grupo familiar, at the Havana Zoo located in the Nuevo Vedado district, and the famous ballerina at the entrance of the Tropicana cabaret.

Painter, drafter, illustrator and teacher, he has cultivated his extraordinary talent for drawing in his art, exhibiting a style from which half-human, half-animal figures appear freely and expressively, as well as spatial layouts that intermingle in fictitious reality or fantasy, which is possible under sometimes grotesque and rarely humoristic themes.

Painter and drafter, she has made the human figure?masculine, feminine, androgynous?the main feature in her work, which has a marked narrative character. But more than the portrayal, the artist has chosen to create a subject for her conceptual concern; her interest is defined in the translation of existential conflicts of a religious, sexual and moral nature, which need a social position. Her heartrending themes contrast with the sobriety of her excellent drawings and the graveness of her pictorial resources.