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.