When limits become metaphor | Art on Cuba, December 2015

By Laura Arañó Arencibia / 1 December, 2015

Art On Cuba Magazine

[…] In the work he has made in recent times, although not abandoning his initial concerns and methodologies, we may realize a transit from individual to collective memory. His “I” transforms into “we”, into a universal man, a subject severed from his communication faculties. Ángel Delgado: Review (april, 2015), one of his most recent solo exhibitions, made in Aluna Art Foundation and curated by Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos—also directors of the space—, focuses on the last ten years of his career. This curatorial exercise reveals his conflicts, which now seem to materialize in anonymous beings, incessantly repeated in almost all his pieces. His faceless figures, only identifiable because of their dimensions, emerge before the new context; the temporal limits of this exhibition precisely coincide with the definitive establishment of Delgado out of Cuba.

[…] Ángel Delgado’s “uncomfortable landscapes” are born in the gaps of this increasing isolation. Again, the imperfect beings of the artists emerge on a canvas, now transfigured in a sort of businessmen wearing jackets and neckties. In the first works of this series, in which the digital impression and the painting hybridized, landscapes reveal a certain oneiric air, probably coming from the mishmash characters suggest together with other objects. Apart from this “rarity” among the elements, however, the most extraordinary thing is the fact of naming as a landscape a painting in which the monumentality of the characters has nothing to do with the secondary position human figure occupies in that genre.

His gradual interest in returning to painting in recent years, approximately since 2010, was not only a process in which he abandoned his assiduous mechanisms and procedures, but also the emergence of new matters in his pieces. The homeless burst in on the canvas to oppose men with yellow and green suits. It is interesting how the artist uses larger figures for those wearing suits, while the vagabond becomes transparent on the background with a subdued silhouette. The difference between both images warns on the strata built to structure class differentiations. Also, other elements like dice, suitcases and sheets, cohabit in the paintings, thus alluding to chance, to travelling. Parallel Stories (2014) outlines the uneven paths in which human beings separate themselves from their fellowmen. The colossal man with a red jacket and a blue bag hurriedly goes through the canvas, while the beggar in the edge of the painting gloomily walks away. How far away might his narrations be before these contradictory and fortuitous parables?