Jenny Alfonso Relova

Cuban painter based in southern France, where she directs the Artelier Habana. She explains about her trajectory that it is about "the Earth as a cocoon, Mother Earth, native land, my origins. Nature and the necessary symbiotic union with other individuals. Almost all of the works come out 'Cubanized,' very colorful. At the heart of the work is the body of the woman, the mother, the one who gives and takes.

"Matter really is 'life,' so my collages are composed of leaves, earth, wood, stones, flowers, metals, coffee, all mixed with acrylic, becoming trees, joining nature, emitting a touch of warmth and transparency. Feathers usually signify motherhood, reminding me of childhood, the promised land (lost). The earth and natural materials fertilize the canvas, the bodies have volume, they invite pairing. The viewer becomes an important symbol of the work itself, seeing from outside, assimilating the work."

Currently she resides in Sospel, which is a village lost in the alpine hinterland of the French Riviera. There she works, owns her studio, and has lived for almost a decade, this Cuban artist. A life full of adventures as happy as they were painful led her one day to this place that few pass through.

Jenny's studio borders the medieval bridge of Sospel, on the old salt route, unique in the region in that it required the payment of a tax to cross it. Part of the work from the last two stages of her creation is found in that space, which also serves as a hostel for those who wish to experience sleeping in an artist's studio.

From ages 11 to 13 she lived in London because her father was appointed to an official position. Upon returning to Cuba, you couldn't readapt to the narrow framework that the country offered at that time.

At age 15 she made the decision to leave Cuba: her horizons were elsewhere. The "Special Period" began and she had to do her pre-university studies on a scholarship in the countryside, an essential condition at that time to pursue university studies (Architecture); a year later she abandoned this effort and did not finish high school.

She studied French. In the end, she was able to finish her studies at the Faculty of Economics. She left Cuba at age 19, requested political asylum in London, a request that was not accepted.

It was in London where, pleasing a friend for his birthday, she bought her first canvases, paints, and brushes and embarked on that adventure. She enrolled in a course in Interior Design and Decoration but one day she had to leave the United Kingdom, with a fake identity card lent to her by a Spanish woman, as she was already at the limit of her residence permit.

Behind her were left four suitcases full of books and her first paintings. She arrived in Madrid. That was a shock, as she had to work in whatever she could find. She worked up to four jobs at the same time, but she was able to legalize her residency and bring her mother to Spain. Those were very hard years in which she worked as an English teacher to survive. She painted little. With what she was living on, there wasn't the desire.

In 1998, when she obtained Spanish nationality, she went to Paris, the place she had always dreamed of. She looked after children and finally finished her Design studies to continue painting. She got married, directed her work, and the first series was born with themes inevitably related to that ghost called Cuba. At that time she mixed sand from Varadero with beans and branches collected from the beach. Cuba kept returning to her mind without ceasing and she felt that she had to portray her memories in some way to uproot them once and for all and move on to something else.

My Flag is a key work, because I needed to return to my roots and wanted a Cuban flag. Unable to obtain one in the market, she made it, as the mambises did in another era (and circumstances, of course). What better material and with more force and blue than her own jeans from comings and goings, companions of emigration offices, borders, lines to be the worthy citizen of some place in the First World.

In the year 2000 she participates in Paris in a group show in which she won a prize and founded an association of Cuban artists in France called Lézard cubain, which formalized her existence as an artist.

She settles in Sospel in 2003, and from that moment on her work gains in universality, the earth appears with a much broader dimension, and her questions are of a global nature.

Thus was born the series of Greek Mythologies, symbols to bring together in a whole my closeness to nature and my reaffirmation as a woman. The ancient Greeks represented the force of nature through semi-human characters and demigods. In that period she painted dozens of women, often with long braids that were roots, leaves, and branches as if they were ideas that emanate from them.

Then came the Fragmentation of the Work series (2006): pieces of the world that we humans are made of, our contradictions, our duplicities. No one is wholly intact. We are superpositions. They are also fragments of the need to "purify" each painting.

At present she is committed to a project for an artist residency that has been purely altruistic. She wants to share this original, wonderful, and unusual place where she lives with young artists, without titles or prizes, so that they can interact with the people here and vibrate to the rhythm of nature. They live surrounded by mountains, rivers, waterfalls. There is plenty of sun, the village is medieval, laden with history. She wants the artist residency to be equipped while maximizing respect for the natural environment: a place to paint, write, sculpt, imagine, mold, turn, or make a creative retreat, according to each person's desire.