Ángel Laborde Wilson

Outstanding artist of Guantánamo's visual arts.

Starting in 1955, he completed his first drawing studies at the "Mariana Grajales" Academy of Popular Art in Guantánamo, participating the following year in his first collective amateur exhibition. In 1962, he obtained a scholarship to study painting at the nascent National School of Arts in Havana, graduating as a Professor of Drawing and Painting in 1967.

His professional life developed from that moment in Art Centers and Schools on the Isle of Youth, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba. Until in 1974 he was selected for his results, technical quality, and vocation to pursue ceramic studies at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, Czechoslovakia, for two years.

He returned to Cuba in 1976 and worked as a professor at the San Alejandro School in Havana.

He returned to Guantánamo as a teacher at the "Regino Eladio Boti" Vocational School of Arts, remaining there until 1989 when he joined CODEMA (Commission for the Development of Monumental and Environmental Sculpture).

Throughout his professional training, Ángel Laborde mastered painting, drawing, caricature, and of course ceramics and sculpture. He is considered one of the most prolific creators, accumulating in his record more than 50 collective exhibitions and around 20 solo shows. As well as permanent and private collections in different Cultural Institutions, Ministries, and Work Centers in Cuba and abroad.

He has also participated in various Provincial and National Competitions and Art Exhibitions where he has received Awards and Mentions.

His constant creative activity has driven him to collaborate in different Magazines, Newspapers, Pamphlets, and Supplements of the country, not only with illustrations but also with writings on the visual arts.

He traveled to Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria in the 1970s. In 1969 he joined the Youth Column of Writers and Artists of the East, and in 1986 when UNEAC was established in Guantánamo, he became a founding member, serving as President of the Visual Arts Branch, being selected for the IV Congress of this institution in 1988.

Master of shells, spirals, and the thought that accompanies them, throughout more than five decades of artistic work, no form of art was foreign to Ángel Laborde.

Last November, during the "Dream While Awake" exhibition at the El reino de este mundo gallery at the José Martí National Library, painter and engraver José Omar Torres described Laborde as the Picasso of Guantánamo. Nothing more fitting for a creator who, along with the technical excellence and aesthetic depth of his work, carried as vital sustenance the solidity of his honesty as an artist and intellectual of our time.

In his house-studio turned gallery and fortress, the painter of shells, as many knew him for constantly resorting to these creatures in his paintings: "call me Spiral Laborde" he requested in an interview.

Laborde was the son of humble sugar dock workers from the defunct Romelié sugar mill in Manuel Tames, and from there he became a painter.

"My first steps I took with teacher Santiago Fabré 'Chago' (portraitist, caricaturist, and professor of visual arts), he was a student of the renowned educator Francisco de Paula Villalón and taught me basic elements of drawing and portraiture at the Mariana Grajales academy, located in what is now the Guiñol theater.

"That's why I arrived at the National School of Arts (ENA) with good technique, and I only perfected it thanks to teachers like Adigio Benítez, Servando Cabrera, Lesbia Vent Dumois, among other renowned ones.

"In 1967 I graduated from ENA and began to seek a more personal style. During that period I had the opportunity to go study ceramics at the School of Industrial Arts in Prague, in Czechoslovakia, from 1974 to 1976." "I was in charge of the group of Cubans studying in that country, I participated in the 5th Meeting of Youth from Capital Cities of Socialist Countries and taught classes in the Czech capital to the children of diplomats.

"Upon my return I conducted several ceramic workshops and was part of the creators of the Antillean Group with Rogelio Martínez, Rafael Kennedy, Ramón Haití, and others to promote our roots. I also made caricatures for the humorous magazine Palante, the magazine Verde Olivo, and the newspaper Juventud Rebelde."

For more than 50 years, Laborde was committed to the visual arts, time in which he has solidified a unique technique that, even with marked foreign influence, does not lose its own essence, it is enough to observe paintings like The Guayabera with that sensation of moving or Mariana Grajales, a vivid portrait of a woman of steel.

Expressionism, romanticism, surrealism, magical realism, and vanguardism intertwine in the author's work, following the line of painters like Picasso, Wilfredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, in the contrast of tempered colors, to move reflection, to spiral-vision, beginning and end of everything.

"My art is based on creative spiralism. I combine that singular form present in the Guantánamo polymita, the guamo, the ear, the universe, galaxies, coffee, thought, while dancing, in time and I put the faces of mestizo women, Latin American in a logical and original way.

"That's why I use a mixed technique, I draw equally on paper or canvas as I cultivate other plastic genres like sculpture, in fact in Cárdenas, Matanzas, there is a piece of mine called Peace Environment in Malakoff plaza.

"I also work with ceramics, one of my favorite hobbies, to the point that I have conducted research on its origin, which goes back to our aboriginal ancestors, and even on the relationship of Martí with this manifestation, alluded to in several writings.

"Precisely that research has given me a certain scientific stance toward art that critics emphasize in my works. I also owe this to teacher Sergio Bernuto, Licensed in Art History, who educated me on how to analyze artistic creations from the formal and conceptual point of view and with that knowledge I try to expose my vision of the world.

"Spiralomania inspires me even to write poetry and articles for the media, where I illustrate about the chromatic diversity found in nature.

"Someone once said that my work was synonymous with meeting, recognition, discovery, where curved lines, angles, depths, narrowness, flesh and stone, light and darkness, the momentary and the eternal converge, as an expression of the unity and diversity that characterizes the world, and that is perhaps because I see in myself a recreator of the visual world or not."

"I think about it and remember how everything began in 1967 when on the Isle of Youth I painted my first crustaceans, with large molars and claws. I would not have imagined that little by little, as I ventured deeper into the marine universe, the journey would become an endless spiral turn.

"From that moment I fell captive to that tendency, which I associate with sound, shells, Venus, Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Frei Betto, Da Vinci, Hokusai (Japanese painter), Karl Marx, Guillermo Collazo, Eustacio Rivera, Leonardo Acosta…allowing me to convey without great artifices the conception of country, family, and life that I sought so much.

"Today my creations are in plazas, parks, institutions in Cuba and the world. The Czech city of Bechyně displays 8 pieces with permanent character. At the Porto Santo Hotel in Baracoa there are two of my sculptures and two murals, while at the headquarters of Fragmented Dance lies my Universal Dance, fountain of shells, which represents three women seeking infinity.

The work of Ángel Laborde could be considered among the most notable of the twentieth century, for its great contribution to Cuban artistic development.

Eleven schools in Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, Isle of Youth, and Havana, testify to this pedagogical legacy among whose disciples were Reinaldo Miravalles (lead actor in the film The Man from Maisinicú), Cuqui Ponce de León, founder of national television, and Daniel Núñez Juárez.

Recognized with the Distinction for National Culture, honored by the national leadership of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, Laborde currently barely works due to lack of materials and conditions to do so, however, not a trace of despair crosses his face:

"In my more than 70 years I always tried to be an artist attached to my time, to make a work that appealed to the human, to the social…and I will continue to do so, because I still have more turns in my spiral, and as long as I have the protection of the shells, I will continue painting."