Jesús Lara Sotelo

Jesús Lara Sotelo (Havana, 1972) painter, sculptor, photographer, ceramicist and self-taught graphic designer. Due to the diversity of genres in which he works, he is recognized as a multifaceted artist within Cuban art and culture. Lara Sotelo has consolidated a parallel discourse centered on the representation of the human condition, which focuses on psychological and spiritual description with mental and technical rigor that is immediately recognized upon witnessing his works[1]. He has developed an extensive literary body of work of more than forty titles, of which he has published eight.

CHILDHOOD

Jesús Lara was born in Havana on September 13, 1972 in a family of working-class parents and grew up on San Lázaro Street in the Cayo Hueso neighborhood of central Havana.

His first drawings date from age four, and with his entry into school life, he drew portraits that revealed important artistic gifts. His mother took him to perfect his talent and take painting classes at the Centro Habana Cultural Center.

Throughout his childhood he suffered severe health conditions due to asthma, which led to frequent stays in medical institutions and permanent physical limitations that strengthened his dedication to drawing, experimentation, and reading.

At age six, a significant event occurs in his life when he finds a Bohemia magazine[2] that he begins to leaf through with the intention of cutting it up and composing figures with the paper, but what he finds there dazzles him immediately. There was an article dedicated to Pablo Picasso with images of his cubist sculptures and canvases. In this event Lara Sotelo recognizes what art is and the infinite possibilities that creation could offer. "In that moment I told myself I want to be this, I want to be Picasso, years later, I wanted to be Lara, I wanted to be myself"[3].

FIRST WORKS

At only 10 years old he wins first prizes in various painting competitions held in different parts of the Cuban capital, until in 1987 he receives an Honorable Mention at the National Salon of Emerging Artists held at the Plaza Gallery in Havana. This recognition allowed him to present, at just 17 years old, his first personal exhibition titled Me refiero al hombre (I Refer to Man), held in 1989 at the Tina Modotti Gallery at the Centro Habana Cultural Center.

From age nine, Sotelo was influenced by his mentor and teacher Eladio Reyes Arias, who was not a painter but a playwright and who had also lost his sight from a young age. With Reyes he acquired knowledge of theater, philosophy, psychology and other essential subjects in his formation.

That young man, upon failing the entrance exams for the San Alejandro Academy of Plastic Arts, was ready to begin a solid self-taught education marked by experimentation, dedication to study, discipline and constant self-evaluation.[4]

He then enrolled in the Fernando Aguado y Rico Technical School in the specialty of Mechanical Design, a specialty in which he graduated in 1993. During this period, he never stopped painting and worked in the mastery of oils, drawing and literature with proven effectiveness.

His anatomical studies date from the beginning of 1990, in which his concern for the human figure is evident. Some of these sketches constitute singular physical studies such as Number 8. Foot Hump. In them he delves exhaustively into the beauty of the body and its infinite possibilities of representation.

Artistic Consolidation

From the beginning of the 1990s, while on the Island the consequences of the fall of the European socialist system begin to be felt, Lara Sotelo initiates an artistic career outside the educational institutionalization of art, also distant from the mainstream of Cuban art, and continues his ascent in painting, drawing and literature.

Nevertheless, he contributes to the surrounding tropological tendency, but from a particular understanding of reality sustained in important series of abstract paintings that he creates until the mid-decade. Representative of this contribution is a series of Illustrations in which he channels a kind of profile of a reality marked by deficiencies, limitations and the incessant search for economic and spiritual solutions. These images would later appear published in his first poetry collection ¿Quién eres tú God de Magod?[5]

With this first book, written between 1990 and 1991, Lara Sotelo makes another psychosocial and artistic contribution to the Cuban panorama of the nineties. In its prologue, renowned Cuban critic Rufo Caballero (Cárdenas 1966- Havana 2011) states: "the existential register of the notebook condenses, at a psychic level, the maladjustment that at a social level had begun to be suffered"[6]. In this sense, Lara anticipates the assimilation of material deficiencies and personal apathy that in a short time will be assumed by a large number of Cubans.

A literary production carried out parallel to poetry and all his work in painting is made up of aphorisms: maxims and affirmations that alert the reader to practical themes of daily life, considered almost outdated in the contemporary literary panorama. Regarding the coexistence of both literary genres, let us see what was written by critic and journalist Ernesto Sierra in his text La creación como sentido de la existencia, published in the cultural newspaper Cubarte: "he confesses that he has been compiling aphorisms since the same time he began writing poems. The fact is not something to ignore, as it invites one to think of a sort of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, the revelation of two sources or driving forces of Lara's work, one that is born from darkness and unease, and another that distills light and inner peace"[7]. These aphorisms that coexist with the young artist's first poetry collection were published two decades later, under the title Mitología del extremo[8], in a compendium of 18 years of this production.

Although his pictorial works so far show a wavering between abstraction and the figurative, with an immersion into the interior of the feminine and a permanent dialogue with cultural reliefs that have come to his time, in the series Catarsis y otras alucinaciones and Quien sopla, roe, Señal proscrita and Shanghái, Lara shows a darkened palette with harsh textures at first, and then an explosion of senses that places them among his best abstract productions.[9]

These first years of the decade were essential in his experimentation with all types of materials, pigments, supports and tools. He works on sculptures, ceramics, drawings, retablos, frescoes, among others. By 1998 he makes his first collages, which will appear invariably in the rest of his work, playing with pictorial illusionism and spatial extension.

By 1999 landscape appears, established as an entirely relatively independent genre in the author's work. "Perhaps from that date he begins to earn the myth of 'the landscape painter of Centro Habana'. Lara approaches the landscape as a dissipated revision of Art History: sometimes from an impressionist pointillism, at times from Cézannian post-impressionism, at opportunities from expressionist poetics, at moments from informalism or from the gains of geometric abstraction; as each moment's feeling dictates, the vocation of each instant, a made-to-order landscape can emerge."[10] Rufo Caballero, 2009.

Well into the new millennium, Lara continues this facet without abandoning his work as a draftsman and especially as a writer. The poetry collections from this period attest to this, such as Paradoja: Capítulo al éxtasis from 1994; Zen sin Sade, from 1999; ¿Llagas inéditas o enojo insomne?, from 2003; El cuarto paso, from 2005 and Ojo sencillo, from 2007.

During this period Lara participates sporadically in group exhibitions and conducts several personal shows. Up to the first half of the 2000s, he has ventured into photography, performance, installation, sculpture and ceramics and stands out due to the multiplicity of his work. Even so, despite the volume and diversity it comprises, he remains outside the institutionalization of art in Cuba, growing in an almost anonymous and parallel manner, and an example of this is the late discovery of his landscape work by renowned Cuban critic David Mateo:

"I discovered his work during one of my usual tours through the 'La Acacia' gallery(…) On that occasion there were about twenty-five or thirty paintings hung on the wall, forming part of a group exhibition in which paradigmatic figures from the Academy were present, active landscape painters with a fairly established reputation and creators newly arrived on the public scene. Among the images they exhibited, Lara's painting stood out for the originality of the context it represented, the expressiveness and the irreverence of its treatment; it was not just another piece in the ensemble, it was rather a disturbing gesture that forced all the complacency and serenity prevailing in the gallery. …"[11] David Mateo. Havana, 2006.

But by 2009 Sotelo reaffirms that he is not a diaspora artist, as might have been believed due to his absence from exhibition circuits, and he achieves this with the installation Velatorio (Wake) held at the José Martí Memorial in Havana.

Other exhibitions of his had already appeared in various events and institutions such as the personal show Onírico during the VII Biennial, De la Utopía al Réquiem I and II in 2004), Lara de ambos mundos from 2005), Sui Génesis from 2007, Brisa Circular from 2007, In Vitro I and II from 2008, and the group exhibition Identidad Nacional from 2008, which David Mateo refers to.

Lara Sotelo has developed an important series of portraits of important personalities from Cuban and universal culture, with two fundamental exhibitions Yo también sueño con serpientes and Íconos de fuego, from the beginning and end of 2013, in which post-cubist practice, collage and drawing predominate. José Lezama Lima, Leopoldo Marechal, Leonardo Padura, Luis Marré, Cesar López, Frank Fernández, Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Noel Nicola and Leo Brouwer, among other figures, have been portrayed by him.

MULTIFACETED ARTIST

At present, Jesús Lara Sotelo considers himself an outsider, who for various reasons bases his art on a path from which he watches contemporaneity pass by, with a discourse centered on beauty and contemplation that influences the development of man, his acceptance and spiritual transcendence.[12]

There are various genres in which he extends his work, such as muralism (see the mural Haiti is another Guernica, from his Make Bacon exhibition, as well as the mural Guatemaya, in the vicinity of the Guatemala embassy in Havana); volumetric sculpture, soft sculpture, audiovisual, engraving, drawing, abstract painting, ceramics, portrait, design, music and literature. His exhibitions total more than seventy between personal and group exhibitions and his work is found in various public and private collections in Cuba and abroad.

Representative of his work are the exhibitions Interconexiones, held in 2009 at the House of Science in Seville, Spain and the Make Bacon exhibition itself from 2010 at the San Francisco de Asís Convent in Havana.

In 2010 he creates his first tribute to dance with the exhibition Supremacía del Éxtasis, dedicated to Alicia Alonso, at the José Martí Memorial where he displays a dozen portraits of the Cuban dancer, as well as ceramics, collages and performance. In the course of this year, Cuba en el Ballet Editions publishes his poetry collection Alicia y las Odas prusianas, re-edited as Alicia y la elección de la fe (2015), at whose presentations he is accompanied by the prima ballerina of the BNC Viengsay Valdés.

In 2012 he participates in the X Biennial of Plastic Arts in Havana with the exhibition Boxing Citadino and in 2014 he exhibits Circus Without Voice in the city of Cienfuegos, in central-south Cuba.

At the XII Havana Biennial, 2015, he presents the exhibition Irla at the Museum of the Revolution, where he performs the artistic action Alicia desde la Bienal, with the presence of the illustrious dancer.

For 2017 he works on a personal exhibition Retrospectiva in which he will account for his work between 1991 and 2017 in both drawing, portraiture, photography, landscape, ceramics, installation, video art, performance, sculpture, etc., as well as his literary work. This exhibition will take place at the Barreto Gallery of the Provincial Center of Plastic Arts and Design, located on Luz and Oficios streets in the historic center of Havana.

Throughout his work, both plastic and literary, it is possible to perceive a total creator, with firm principles and moral firmness. As one of the first voices that made known his value as a painter and poet presaged, the now deceased art critic Rufo Caballero Mora: "There is the 'morality' of art that matters to Lara: an art that dresses as it pleases, that puts on the clothes it wants in each moment, but that neither wants nor can renounce a humanistic responsibility that was, as it were, whistled to him from time immemorial, by other artists who once endeavored to understand that tangle of perplexities that constitute the days of man on earth". Rufo Caballero Mora. Havana, 2009.[13]

Cuban writer César López (National Prize for Literature) defines him: "Painter, ceramicist, sculptor, engraver and, naturally, poet. He coordinates the magic of his world where line, color, space, always carried by a rhythm in which the external brings with it the heartfelt, moves his imagination until it makes itself felt, internally, upright and ineffable."[14]

Behind the overwhelming force that defines him, hides, as a driving force, the restless spirit that is always hunting for new horizons. "If any trait has always characterized the poetics of Cuban artist Jesús Lara Sotelo it is nonconformity, the revision and constant mutability of his proposals".[15] Critics have noted his evident concern for the everyday, for temporality, for overflowing passions and the great generational crises that overwhelm humanity, as is the case with Piter Ortega, when he states: "his work mocks prefigured paths, stable routes. Which seems very beneficial to me, in that it oxygenates creation and prevents lethargy, fatuous reiteration." [16]

The predominance of those who see in him an avant-garde artificer has extended with each delivery he presents before the viewer's eye. Cuban narrator, essayist and professor Francisco López Sacha considers him "a complex artist who needs much vital space to express himself". Cuban poet and essayist Lina de Feria sums up about him: "Jesús Lara has no limit with the code that makes him great…"[17] And Cuban poet Marilyn Bobes has written about him: "he is the Cuban poet in whom I have best seen expressed the spirit of the end of one millennium and the beginning of another, and that 'unfinished thirst' that desperately drags him towards a utopia to which he can no longer cling is what drives him compulsively towards both word and brush."[18]

AWARDS

2016

Honorable Mention in the UNEAC Julián del Casal Poetry Prize for the poetry collection "Paradoja: Capítulo al éxtasis" from 1994. Sala Villena of the UNEAC, September 16, 2016.

1987

Honorable Mention at the National Salon of Emerging Artists. Plaza Gallery. City of Havana.

First Provincial Prize of the FEEM Festival.

1986

Painting Prize. National savings competition. MINBAS

1985

Painting Prize. National savings competition. MINBAS

1984

Painting Prize. Creative Center of Centro Habana

1983

Honorable Mention Painting. José Martí National Library

1982

Honorable Mention Painting. Cultural Center of Playa

RECOGNITIONS

2008

Distinction as Illustrious Guest for his collaboration in the teaching program of the Faculty of Spanish Language for Chinese students. University of Havana.

2009

Recognition from the United Nations Organization (UN) for the promotion and dissemination of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Project Strokes Towards Development.

Recognition for twenty-one years of community work. "La Zorra y el cuervo", Havana, Cuba.

Recognition for twenty years of career from the collective A Buena hora, radio program. "La Zorra y el cuervo", Havana, Cuba.

Recognition for twenty years of artistic creation by the José Martí Society in Havana, Cuba.

Declaration as illustrious citizen by the Municipality of Capmany jointly with prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso. Catalonia, Spain.

2011

Receives status as Distinguished Visitor of Guatemala City. (April 29, 2011)

2013

The Ceramic Museum awards him recognition for his participation in the La Vasija event held every year sponsored by the Museum itself and the National Council of Plastic Arts. Havana (C.N.A.P.) Cuba.

2014

The Provincial Music Center of Cienfuegos, Rafael Lay recognizes Master Lara Sotelo for his contribution to the musical project "Psalm of Drizzle".

2015

Receives recognition from the newspaper Trabajadores and is gifted a painting of José Martí for the institution (January 28).

The José Martí Cultural Society presents the plastic artist with the recognition of the Usefulness of Virtue, along with other great Cuban artists such as Silvio Rodríguez, Duo Buena Fe among other journalists and Cuban institutions for hard work in favor of Cuban society and the pursuit of Martí's ideas. (January 22).

Receives recognition from the International Triathlon Union for support in the realization of the Havana Triathlon. (January 24-25, 2015.)

2016

Receives entry into the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba UNEAC. (August 2016)

Receives recognition from the National Museum of Dance for his artistic work dedicated to dance, ballet and the figure of Alicia Alonso, from the hands of its director Pedro Simón. (December 2016)

BOOKS WRITTEN

1991 ¿Quién eres tú, God de Magod? Published in 2008

1994 Paradoja: Capítulo al éxtasis (digital) unpublished

1999 Zen sin Sade. (digital) unpublished

2003 POETRY: ¿Llagas inéditas o enojo insomne? (digital) unpublished

2005 POETRY: El cuarto paso. (digital) unpublished

2007 POETRY: Ojo sencillo (digital) unpublished

2009 APHORISMS: Mitología del extremo. Published in 2009.

2011 POETRY: Alicia y las Odas prusianas, Published in 2010.

2013 POETRY: Domos Magicvs. Published in 2013.

2013 APHORISMS: El escarabajo de Namibia. (digital) unpublished

2014 POETRY: Lapso enervado (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Vellonegrodelcaos, (digital) unpublished

ESSAY: "Twenty critiques and essays on diversity in art". (digital) unpublished

2015 POETRY: Trece cebras bajo la llovizna. (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Grand Prix (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Piercing de pupila (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Luz de loto (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Amaranto (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Alicia y la elección de la fe. (Digital) unpublished

2016 POETRY: Lebensraum. Published by Colección sur editores.

POETRY: Los Ultimátum. (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Lina de Feria y Jesús Lara, a dos manos. Published by Colección sur editores.

POETRY: "Diario inconexo" (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Anthology El laberinto ante mí. Published by Colección sur editores (2017).

POETRY: Irla I. (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Train surfing (Irla II) (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Non legor, non legar (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Un milímetro de jardín. (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Los pájaros de Hitchcock. (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Mapa de Ícaro. (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Deshielo en el ático (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Kroni y la reencarnación de los espejos (digital) unpublished

2017 POETRY: Causas pendientes (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Berlín (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Poemas capitales (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Anthology Poética La vaguedad y otros problemas (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Todo se va (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Los grandes juegos públicos (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Theatro mundi (digital) unpublished

POETRY: La virtud de tañer una cabeza (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Kroni y la reencarnación II (digital) unpublished

POETRY: El arte del fracaso (digital) unpublished

POETRY: La subasta de mis huesos (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Third grade [Interrogations] (digital) unpublished

POETRY: Phygofile (digital) unpublished

COLLECTIVE BOOKS:

2010 Anthologized in: "Lezama, ese misterio que nos acompaña" (Ed. Unión, Havana, 2010)

2015 "Lina de Feria y Jesús Lara a dos manos" Poetry. (Colección Sur editores, Havana, 2016)

2015 Anthologized in: "Alicia Alonso en palabras de poetas" (Ediciones Cumbres, Madrid, 2015)

PUBLICATIONS IN MAGAZINES OR NEWSPAPERS:

Publishes in Cubaliteraria the short story "Horror Vacui" (November 2015)

Publishes poems in El Tintero, Literary Supplement of the Newspaper Juventud Rebelde (Sunday, October 2, 2016)