Alberto Lago

Alberto is an acclaimed artist from Manzanillo in the province of Granma. Lago studied at the Academy of Plastic Arts in Holguín and graduated from the Superior Institute of Art in Habana, Cuba.

He works primarily using fluorescent pigments that transform under the effects of black light. Lago's works abound in symbols of happiness, such as butterflies, smiling faces and flowers.

Alberto Lago committed himself since his student years at ISA to investigating painting as a historical material of visual expression, until he found in it sufficient procedures that would allow him to develop his sensitive neoromanticist 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 characteristic of the times in which it develops.

On the other hand, 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 experiential pleasures.

This 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 rupture.

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

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

The relative connotations of many of these concepts are related to the presence of a duality that permeates all of the painter's work: the counterpoint between real experience and the experience that, through art, is sublimated in memory or imagination; without excluding the possibility that both fabricate each other mutually.

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

In his painting, the abstract is combined 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 color spectrum is used in an uninhibited manner but taking care to avoid stridency through mixing with white. The result, especially in the case of landscapes, is one of a "noisy harmony" that encompasses everything.

Lago's work also has a characteristic that distinguishes it in the contemporary Cuban plastic arts 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 that he considers aggressive and cynical—thus reaches its paroxysm 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.