• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 01 / 06 / 2011

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By Cubarte / [email protected] / Wednesday, 05 January 2011 13:29. Noted Cuban painter Kcho donates pieces for the people's delight. Photo: cubasi.cu. Once again Kcho is news. Three donations of works made by this creator were exhibited the 28 of December, as the last exhibition of 2010, in the lower floor of the Cuban Art building of the Cuban Fine Arts Museum, in a tribute the institution made under the title Kcho Donaciones.

Collections he owned, were delivered by the artist to the municipality museum of Isla de la Juventud, an event that favored the opening there a hall with paintings of different painters, such as René Portocarrero and Wifredo Lam. Likewise, he donated some works to the Fine Arts Museum, among other institutions, situation highlighted by its director Moraima Clavijo, who also highlighted the usual generosity of Kcho during his twenty years of artistic life.

Corina Matamoros, a prestigious curator who has been specialized during her professional trajectory in the Cuban contemporary art, referred in her presentation words to the small exhibition as an example of the exchange between the institution and the artist. She remembered that in the nineties, the museum was not yet prepared for a new poetry and, nevertheless, they asked the artists works for it, the most important collection of Cuban art in the Isla.

The specialist qualified as a “rare quality of Kcho, to interfere and reach the most diverse circles, even those that are very distant from art” and indicated how at the start of the Special Period, his work touched the Cuban art and culture. “In the last few years, the artist showed an increasing interest in the artistic patrimony in the community institutions and specified that the pieces in exhibition were donated and the artist himself had the courtesy of leaving the selection in the hands of the museum”. At the same time, the artist referred briefly during the event to his work and assured that “in the last years my life has changed a lot” and that “the most important patrimony is the revolution and that is what makes me be who I am”.

To end the event the offering of the singer Polito Ibañez who sang a beautiful song dedicated to the artist.

Two charcoal drawings, one of them with a landscape of boats and the other, less seeing, some skulls similar to an inn with figures crossed at the end of the paper, as well as an installation, Objeto luminoso (from 2007). The installation consists of a Sun made of round wood which rays – paddles extend in a diameter of 400 cm.

The work of Kcho is easily recognized for his constant references to travel, through different icons, such as boats, tubes, paddles, breakwaters and sails as well as the use of poor materials, both naturals or from the environment that make the events.

The work, with which he conquered the celebrity, was exhibited at the Havana V Biennial exhibition in 1994, La Regata and it is a very touching and open allegory to the real context of the exodus of Cubans held in the summer of that year.

In a stand of the Fine Arts Museum are tens of important national and foreign art publications such as Flash Art, Art News or Artecubano, which covers are his works, an iconography he redesigned as a new installation “genre”.

His topics were born, there is no doubt, from inextricable competitions of the human condition, from there paradoxes such as travel and island, infinite time and death and island as an identity and exit, as well as other ones, still question and would be only a matter of knowing if it will not exhaust such a rich crossroads which are the object of reference of his art.

Kcho, has been, since his start, a mention in the Cuban art or a chronic in the life of the media in Cuba. For two decades his artistic work has bee valued with bigger or less certainty by specialists, critic and journalists, always accompanied by an insular critic that recognized him in a praiseworthy way due to the subversive impact caused by the collision of parabolas about the sea migrations in his installations, having great prestige for being included, still very young, in the collection of the MOMA, as well as in recent years knowing some critic as devastating as curiously shocking. However, far beyond the inevitable search of the evolution the art assumes, inevitable to every artist not to stop in the exhaustion, the contribution of Kcho is undeniable inside that distinctive sign of the Cuban contemporary art, which is of very varied diversity. (Translated by cubasi.cu)

Source: www.radioangulo.cu/en/index.php/news/culture/