Alberto Lago

Originally from Manzanillo, a nucleus from which an important segment of Cuba's most current visual art in eastern Cuba comes, Lago graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and works mostly using fluorescent pigments that stand out under black light.

He usually paints symbols of happiness such as butterflies, smiling faces and flowers, and for this occasion his idea was to create "a form of escapism that sends a message of love, happiness and spirituality," he explained in the same letter.

The artist has held several exhibitions on the Island. In 2011 he won the Internazionale di Pittura ISOLE Sardegna-Cuba Prize and in the coming months he will do an artistic residency at the Malévoz Cultural Quarter in Monthey, Switzerland.

Still a university student, he found a line of work that he has developed steadily to the present day. With an absolutely personal stylistic mark, Lago explores concepts related to the subjective experience of human happiness and all the states associated with it: tranquility, pleasure, amazement, ecstasy, euphoria, well-being, joy, etc.

The relative connotations of many of these concepts are related to the presence of a duality that permeates the entire work of the painter: the counterpoint between real experience and the experience that, through art, is sublimated in memory or imagination; not excluding the possibility that both are mutually constructed.

The human experience of happiness has been a subject that artists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall and others occasionally addressed. Alberto Lago draws from these sources, but also from the psychedelic visuality of the sixties and from the various currents of neo-expressionism.

In his painting, the abstract combines with the figurative and almost every element is constructed from a repertoire of signs more or less stereotyped by culture (happy faces, hearts, stars, flowers, etc.), connected to the imprint of American bad painting.

The entire chromatic spectrum is used in an uninhibited manner but taking care to avoid harshness through mixing with white. The result, especially in the case of landscapes, is that of a "noisy harmony" that encompasses everything.

Lago's work also has a characteristic that distinguishes it in the contemporary Cuban visual art landscape: it is painted almost exclusively with fluorescent pigments, so the canvases are transfigured under the spell of black light.

The escapist vocation—which this painter has fully assumed as a vital stance toward a reality he considers aggressive and cynical—thus reaches its peak not in the creation of a certain type of images, but in the creation of an almost fantastic atmosphere that invites the viewer to participate in its unreality.

He exhibited his works in the personal exhibition "The Hidden Wonder" in one of the vaults of La Cabaña during the twelfth Havana Biennial.

Daniel G. Alonso in OnCuba expressed "Every work I appreciated caught my attention, its plastic and visual results are unique in our context; there, stopped in time, my eyes tried to capture each detail, each brushstroke and each nuance. Likewise, I was able to notice several aspects that, without a doubt, are part of the daily work of the artist, who very much enjoys playing with the spectator's sensoriality and their states of mind."

Alberto Lago bet from his student years at ISA on investigating painting as a historical material of visual expression, until finding in it sufficient procedures that would allow him to develop his sensitive neo-romantic imagination as a young artist of the twenty-first century.

For some professors, critics and specialists, the risks assumed by his painting were among the boldest approaches of his generation, because his work moves between a luminosity and a coloration of real and apparent happiness but that carries within its chaos a high level of existential conflict, very much in keeping with the times in which it develops.

Moreover, Lago is not afraid of the medium: neither the pictorial nor the sociological, and he overflows from acrylic to force us not to be indifferent to his concerns, emotional states and lived pleasures.

That very action from an updated painting toward all his inner thinking is fostering new creative conflicts from which Metanoia has emerged, a series that is seen as a potentially productive process of healing after a fall or break.

The canvases he is creating start from and are nurtured by that psychological act and concept associated with positive self-recovery and in it he is again reorganizing and maximizing his procedures and his concerns toward the issues that obsess him: sometimes more or even very intimate, sometimes more global to very constellation-like, and still very representative of a fresh imagination and sensibly nonconformist with the dominant past and the unresolved present. His work with painting remains directed at discovering that amid so many fears, in the end there exists and surrounds us a world of infinite light yet to be explored and enjoyed.