Time as Metaphor at Eight Modern

Margo Thoma, Eight Modern Co-Director and Carlos Pérez Vidal at the Opening Reception of Time as Metaphor.

Carlos Pérez Vidal, current artwork addressing the issues of personal identity, cultural memory, and art-historical stereotyping, communicates his sociopolitical observations in a visual language that surreally compounds parody, visual poetry, and uncanny elements. The artist is known for creating confrontational dialogues between diverse iconographies and the specific framework of the Spanish Colonial altar. Drawing upon the cultural diversity of the Americas, Time as Metaphor reveals unexpected connections between seemingly disparate religious, political, and art-historical icons.

New Mexico Artist, Carlos and New Mexico Friend.

Carlos Pérez Vidal, during the Live Video Performance and Installation.

Time is Over, Video Performance and Installation.

Pérez Vidal has been a central figure in the recent Cuban art movement that is known as the Cuban Renaissance. In the mid-1980s, he was founder member of the art group La Campana, which was committed to the creation of art that reflected the sensibilities of his generation – voicing its artistic and ethical challenges to Cuba’s socio-cultural landscape. The art group met with the Island censorship. Currently living and working in Florida, the artist has participated in more than ninety exhibitions internationally.

Twenty-seven Chosen and One Errant, Mixed Media, Installation.

Dialéctica de la Fidelidad, Mixed Media, Installation.







Carl Thoma, Eight Modern Insvestor, and Art Collector.

Live Video Performance and Installation, Eight Modern, Santa Fe, N.M.

Carlos during the "Smoking the History" (To the outstanding Generation of 1980), Live Video Performance at Eight Modern.

Time as Metaphor signifies Eight Modern’s continued commitment to premiering works by internationally acclaimed artists who have never before been represented in Santa Fe.

Carlos Pérez Vidal: Time as Metaphor.

July 20 - August 26, 2007.

Eight Modern

231 Delgado Street,

Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501.

eightmodern.net

Arte Cubano

“No conozco mejor definición de la palabra arte que esta: El arte es el hombre agregado a la naturaleza, la realidad, la verdad, pero con un significado, con una concepción, con un carácter, que el artista hace resaltar, y a los cuales da expresión, que redime, que desenreda, libera, ilumina”.

Vincent Van Gogh.


Un aspecto importante es la presencia de lo religioso. Tiene que ver con las fuentes, pero también con esa mística bastante común en el nuevo arte cubano. Más allá de los temas religiosos, en esta plástica encontramos una acción de la religiosidad – categoría que Mircea Eliade consideraba inherente a la conciencia – a nivel de poética. Su inspiración sobre el movimiento ha sido sobre todo precolombina o afroamericana, como en Elso, Bedia, Luis Gómez, Ana Mendieta, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey y Santiago Rodríguez Olazabal, pero entre los jóvenes que despuntan en la palestra internacional, son frecuentes los temas místicos y cristianos ( Oscar Aguirre Comendador, Esterio Segura y Carlos Pérez Vidal ), sus propuestas interactúan y reflexionan sobre aspectos cruciales de la sociedad contemporánea.

Gerardo Mosquera.

Oscar Aguirre Comendador, Escudo Evangelizado, Madera, Metal y Ceramica, 65 x 50 cm.

Esterio Segura, Santo de Paseo por el Trópico, Vaciado en Yeso, Policromado y Metal, Tamaño Natural.


Carlos Pérez Vidal, El Milagro del San Jorge Apache, Acrilico, Madera y Metal, 130 x 100 x 50 cm.





Arte Cubano Actual, Text in the Catalogue by Gerardo Mosquera, Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo, A. C., México, D.F., Fundación Cultural Televisa, A.C., Campos Eliseos y Jorge Eliot, Polanco, México D.F.

Gerardo Mosquera is an Art Historian, Curator and Art Critic, Founder member of La Bienal de La Habana and Centro Wifredo Lam.

Currently he is a Curator at The New Museum of Comtemporary Art, in New York, NY.

The Son of Carpenter Contemplation

The Son of Carpenter Contemplation, 2009, Retablo, 140 x 90 x 6 cm.

In current painting – retablo, such as “The Son of Carpenter Contemplation”, I refer to a familiar art – historical and biblical motifs, taken in this case from the iconography passion of the cross and the resurrection of Christ. In composition and technique this work is reminiscent of Italian early gothic with influences of the spiritual life of St. Francis of Assisi, the work draws its form from the 12th century San Damiano crucifix, the icon before which St. Francis experience conversion. This work also have influeces of Russian icon tradition, and the mysticism of Catalan romanesque legacy.

Symbolicarium

Installation, 2009, Wood, Metal, Fabric, Plastic, Soil, 200 x 90 x 30 cm.

Symbolicarium, a solo show by cuban-born artist Carlos Pérez Vidal featured the vernissage at Caribbean Court Hotel in Vero Beach. The event was presented by World Art Projects. The exhibition feature twenty five artworks, including installations, paintings, retablos and photographs with catalogue.

Michelle Genz, text about Carlos Pérez Vidal.

His artwork combine painting, carving and sculpture with the use of written words and phrases. At times, Pérez Vidal’s exhibitions involve performance, as in one entitle “Smoking the History”, in which he wrote the words in charcoal on an adobe american indian fireplace, as smoke Cuban cigar from an ancestral afro-pipe and connected with afrocuban guaguanco music as a ritual. His focus on ancient myths and icons, spirituality, human conditions and utopias can provoke reflections on art-historical parodies, politics, opportunity and artistic expression.

Carlos Pérez Vidal at around the age of six, his best friend’s father, a well-known ceramicist, remarked on Carlos’ talent to his parents, and urged then to send him to art school. “Every single day when I finished school, I would do two things: play baseball and do artwork – sculpture, drawing, painting and ceramic, together with my best friend Oscar”. he recalls. His parents support him with art education. Carlos was nurtured by the same art teacher through the age of 10, then passed the test to move to the next level of elementary art school, and later the next in the famous San Alejandro Academy of Visual Art, and then in the National Art School of Havana. Eventually he gained admission to the prestigious Superior Art Institute of Havana. By the time he graduated in 1989, he was already very active in the Cuban Renaissance, the avant-garde movement in Cuba. “ It was a great new Cuban art revolution,” say Pérez Vidal. He was founder member of Group La Campana, involved with conceptual and performance art. “ Our outstanding Generation were trying to democratize the culture,” he say. By the lately 1980s and the early 1990s, censorship of artists had driven many of the most intellectual among then to emigrate to Europe, Canada, Mexico and the United States.

Pérez Vidal, Patty, Mechelle Genz and Victoria Palacios.

In 1993, while Pérez Vidal was a professor at the National School of Visual Art of Havana, he won a visa through the Clinton Administration to come to U.S. By then, his works had earned 16 national awards, and he had multiple exhibits in the National Museum. These were heady times for artistic activity. “It was a marvelous era for my generation in the 1980s and early 1990s. We wanted to improve artistically everything in Cuba, so we created social projects full of new ideas.” “Art education in Cuba is among of the best in the world,” he says. “ Cuba art school taught us to be resourceful and creative. We don’t have much art material there. But we were very inventive with recycle sources.”


Carlos Studio.

Photographer Tom McCarthy Jr. at Carlos Pérez Vidal Studio.

Silvia Medina and Victoria Palacios from World Art Projects.

Pérez Vidal strongly urges an end to the U.S. embargo of Cuba. “ It’s an inappropriate and inhuman law that from the beginning to the present never helped the Cuban people, only gives power to the government.”

Alma Mater, 2009, Photograph.

Vernissage view, Silvia Medina, Susan Abello and Carlos Pérez Vidal.

Carlos Pérez Vidal, Karl M. Steene and Mrs. Steene.

He continues creating to this day to incessantly offering viewers with a mystical and atmospheric art work. “Some of my artworks metaphorically are connected between profane and divine, all constructed with a poetical halo".

The Vernissage food was provided by Cuban chef-owner Felix Fajardo of the restaurant Felix's Place.

Vernissage view.

Vernissage view. Run Rennick and Mrs. Rennick and Carlos Perez Vidal.

Sam Baita, Victoria Palacios, Tom McCarthy Jr. and Carlos Pérez Vidal.

Vernissage view.

The Thinker, Installation, 2009 (Detail), Carving, Acrylic on Wood, 150 x 150 cm.

Article by Michelle Genz. The article in V.B. 32963 Magazine, pages 17, 18 and 19, September 17, 2009.

An Sculptural Poetry

“I wanted to put painting once again
at the service of the mind”.
Marcel Duchamp.

Carlos Pérez Vidal art project blends artistic allegory of ancient roots and legends, metaphor, mysticism, history and social perceptions. This imagery compendium traces symbolism to engage the viewer simultaneously in art history parodies, social critique and reflections, enjoying great artworks. His work renders sensibility, values of the social strata and ancestral syncretism of this cuban born, Florida based artist. Pérez Vidal’s altars resurrect the symbolism with archaeological evocations bringing to his projects a rainbow of premonitions to touch the complex philosophical themes of right and wrong in an ambiguous contemporary world through his knowledge of primary religions and traditions.

Smoking the History. ( To the outstanding Generation of 1980) Video-Performance, 2007. Eight Modern, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

To imagine a more definitive Pérez Vidal art process and impossible to resist the philosophy fascinations of his symbolic world. His art experience as the bases for an extended discourse upon the mystical existential and cultural aspects of society. Addressing the issues of personal identity, cultural memory, and stereotyping, his multimedia video-installation and performance, “Smoking the History” reveals bridges between parody and art history.

His iconographic perspective on the multi-aesthetic installations “Twenty-seven chosen and one errant” reflect connections among symbols and concepts from diverse cultures, and modern point of views. This work whose widespread visual emblems was created with a sensitive and pictorical culture. He created artwork to humanity’s place in the vast poetical vision of existence.

Twenty seven Chosen and One Errant, Installation, 2006. Eight Modern, Santa Fe, New Mexico, July, 2007.

Some of his artworks which invokes cultures, memory, alchemy signs, history, retrospective time, relativity and fantasy is a project of eclectical sources from his loving and suffering Caribbean Island of Cuba where multi-cultural fusion, living the unit of diversity, subjugates into a totalitarian and controversial regime. This regime in the context of the 1980s censor the freedom and prohibit the free expression in Cuba socio-cultural life which have a rich and unique cultural heritage. Some of his installations and performances synthetically reflect an assemblages of this dramatic odyssey imposed for almost five decades. The installation “Dialéctica de la Fidelidad” communicates his socio-cultural reflections in a visual language.


Dialéctica de la Fidelidad, Installation, 2003.

Energías Comprometidas. Installation, 2004.

Pérez Vidal was an active artist of the new movement in Cuba that has been so-called Generation of the 80’s or Cuban Renaissance. He was founder member of the art group La Campana "creating a high art to their own sensibilities, philosophical, ethical, aspirations to analyzed and confront the relationship between human conditions, art-historical parodies, utopias and the society into the universe. The conceptual concerns predominated together with political messages and criticism became a focal point for the free expression of ideas and this art demanded a plural aperture in the art scene."(1). This situation together with the moral and social crisis in the Island by the Cuban regime that produce an official censorship with prohibitions of the art groups, artists, alternative aesthetic to this outstanding generation, it caused and forced the emigration of even more artists and intellectuals.


Huella Rediviva, Installation, 1989.

Pérez Vidal’s poetic verbal supplements of questioning are essential reference in each artwork that initially remark from the late 1980’s and the early 1990’s the vision that questioned the ideals of contemporary art canon into the “culture of images”. His assemblages dialogue of cultural stereotyping extended to look at afro-cuban receptacle of power and a saint in the popular catholic baroque manner mixed with the middle age icons tradition, embracing a variety of idioms that influence those projects.

La pareja comprometida, (The engaged partner, to Loving M. Mitchell), Installation, 1995-1997.

During his first years in America, he lived and happily adapted to his new culture. He studied the new language and worked hardly, traveling in America and Europe and lived intensity into the new society. He picked up and absorbed his sensibility to incorporate the new values and challenges of the art world as an artist living in exile.

Confabulación de Poderes. Installation, 2006.

Pérez Vidal continues to incorporate and increase his artistic spectrum using universal themes like pop fashion mixed with media-images and aesthetic parodies.


La Anunciación, ( Las Bodas de Oro), Installation, Barcelona, 2007.

He created installations, paintings, drawings, performances, sculptures and photographs with imagination, reflections, love and poetry. His interactive art is an invitation to enjoy the circle of life and creativity.

Alex R. Ross

September, 2008.

(1) From: El Manifiesto La Campana, 1988. ( La Campana Project Statement )

Text by Alex R. Ross about Carlos Pérez Vidal Exhibition: Recent Art Works, 2008.
Alex R. Ross is a freelance Art Critic and Writer.