Alicia came with Nelson Domínguez to Ciego de Ávila

March 3, 2020

After its opening on February 28th, the Personal Exhibition "My friend Alicia," a special and posthumous gift from Cuban painter Nelson Domínguez to the Prima Ballerina Assoluta of Cuba's National Ballet, continues to attract people of all ages in Ciego de Ávila.

Made up of around 60 works, the exhibition occupies a respectful space in the Raúl Martínez galleries and the Provincial Council of Plastic Arts, located on the central boulevard of the City of the Gateways.

Accessing them becomes the first and irreversible step to being trapped among the fine harmonies of brushstrokes that, at times, one does not know whether they come from a hand, or from the sound of violins transformed into that succession of movements that someone, who knows how many centuries ago, simply defined as dance.

Beyond the exercise of imagination, Nelson commented that in each of those works Alicia Alonso had danced in the palm of his hands.

Alicia is dance, painting, music, art…

With that gift, Nelson's eyes capture and his brush places before the viewer, for posterity, instants of an Alicia who dances even in the stillness of that ancient wooden armchair where, perhaps thoughtful, perhaps fluttering among the wonders of her country, he saw her or simply imagined her, elderly but still a child, his artist friend.

Around eight weeks of permanence will open the possibility of seeing our Alicia dancing on stage, conspiring with her silence, touching her with the tip of a pupil's eye, just as thousands of Cubans have done in more than a dozen provinces and as others hope to do, before the exhibition closes its tour throughout the Archipelago, before 2020 closes its curtains.

"My friend Alicia is not just a wink of complicity between visual arts and dance, nor even between the protagonist and her portraitist; it is the playful exercise trying to capture, between inks and brushstrokes, the eternal and agonizing romance between the butterfly and the light that burns its wings…" said José Aurelio Paz Jiménez, National Prize for Journalism José Martí for Life's Work, during the opening of the exhibition.

And it is, beyond any exercise of imagination, what Nelson himself commented that night, when he affirmed that in each of those works Alicia Alonso had danced in the palm of his hands.

This is not the painter's first contact with the Avilean gaze. As an extension of other exhibitions of his in the territory, the hospitals Doctor Antonio Luaces Iraola, in the provincial capital, and Roberto Rodríguez, in Morón, surprise doctors, nurses, technicians, executives, patients and visitors, through murals that, like good medicine, also carry the quality of healing and preventing, from the axial tomography of art that is born for good.