Waldo Saavedra

Born in La Habana. Painting, set design and costume design.

Initially self-taught, in 1982 he entered the Instituto Superior de Arte of La Habana, Cuba.

He taught drawing and painting classes in La Habana, Cuba.

He created illustrations for various publications and designed costumes and scenery for concerts by Amaury Pérez, Pedro Camejo, Adesio Alejandro and the Nueva Trova Cubana. He also participated in the production of the film "Hello Hemingway" as Artistic Director, (1989)

He has also worked on cultural television programs in his native country, where he was also a fine arts teacher.

He exhibits for the first time in the city of Santa Clara, Cuba, in 1978. Later he presented his work in the cities of Caibarén and La Habana, Cuba. His work has been admired in different countries: Germany, Belgium, Argentina and others. In our country: Mexico D.F., Guadalajara, Jal. and Monterrey, N. L.

Award in the Poster and Graphic Propaganda Contest "26 de Julio", La Habana; Special Mention, Competition for the creation of the monument to Simón Bolívar, Habana, and First Prize in Painting, Caibarén, Cuba (1981). First Prize at the Posada Drawing Salon in 1992. Honorable Mention at the II Bienal José Clemente Orozco, Guadalajara 1993 and First Prize-Honorable Mention at the October Salon, 1994 and 1995 in Guadalajara, Jal.

" His creative conception has been developed within figurative neoexpressionism, surrealism and magical realism. Within these currents he has created balanced compositions with suggestive color in which he captures themes where conscious or subconscious anecdotes prevail in his aesthetic discourse ". Ramírez Godoy.
I am not post... nor modern, Informador, 1998

Waldo Saavedra: a forum in half-light, a feminine voice that recites, the figure of the artist that is born, tears itself apart and emerges once more, the images, the faces and the feeling of La Habana, the sounds of a drum. Hyperrealism combined with (hyper)sensitivity. The synchronization of commands that ends in the formation of the Cuban flag

At the opening of his exhibition "I am not post... nor modern" at the Pasillo del Arte of Televisa, Cuban artist Waldo Saavedra not only presented a show like few seen before, but a performance of extraordinary execution.

The voice of Sheila Ríos rose: "The ground, at ground level, until now I have only lived at ground level, looking at the ground, attentive to the ground. Do not return to the places where you were happy... where your eyes opened to wonder, it was only an invention of your nostalgia. To the ground, I am not going to come out at ground level, it germinates beyond disenchantment...", alternated with the metallic vibration of cymbals and drums.

Projected images recapitulated the history of that Caribbean country that has lived pain, destruction and spiritual deterioration finding affinity in the force of percussion instruments of tin, zinc and brass in charge of Abraham Calleros.

"I see my contemporaries pass by, my ironies and my friends, some dying of laughter, or simply dead. Trapped in my arms, saved from oblivion and disenchantment. I am this one, the one who is here baring her innermost self, baring her veins, baring her tongue... oh, God! When will we finish happening?. As long as we have something left to do, we have done nothing. Only deserves freedom, life, the one who must conquer it every day..."

The circular space is centered by a bed from which, from the interior of a white mantle, hands emerge, arms, a head, shoulders, a back, a male body full of life, the body of Waldo, of Waldo Saavedra, charged with luminous energy like that of a planet, a planet in tension.

"My memory was never erased, his body stretched out, seen from behind. I looked at him from below, from the perspective of life. I was at his side and yet, perfectly distant, intensely warm and knows that of the two thousand times one makes love in life, truly, only two or three remain essential, unforgettable... the rest are only returns, imitations and repetitions. Because beauty is a spell that burns when through the distance of years two gazes touch... beauty is a rupture, a rebellion against time."

The body tears itself, is stained with red, the blood of wear, of death and of war. "The future is an indifferent void that interests no one while the past is full of life, it excites us, it irritates us and that is why we want to destroy it or retouch it. Men want to be masters of the future only to be able to change the past, that is why La Habana is a fixation in perpetual motion, that is why the island is a voyage to its seed."

La Habana in its splendor, La Habana in decrepitude, the mother, the son, the sea, love, the friend, the cry emitted by the cymbals. "The light moves uncertainly, the light goes out. Once again I am in the closed night, the night is clean and I want to speak: the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion and I refuse to think that memory sweeps away, that mediocrity imposes itself, that lies end up being truth, that we forget who we were, how we are and what height we can reach."

The figure returns to its fetal position, covered by a white mantle. The voice of Shiela wraps itself in the red mantle, placing itself next to the artist. The drums give a closing, wrap in blue and the three, on the bed, are one single flag. In the background Silvio Rodríguez sings: "I am happy, I am a happy man, and I want those who are dead to my happiness to forgive me, for this day", the video transcurs again, a production in perfect synchrony with the song.

The Pasillo del Arte projected in turn its videogram, Waldo Saavedra said: "I am not post, nor modern", making very clear his position within contemporary art.
Thus, last Friday night, Waldo Saavedra demonstrated the work he knows how to do, the creative capacity he possesses, the commitment and dedication with which he counts both to realize a complete expressive manifestation of quality and complexity, as well as to express his message on canvas and paper in the most absolute union of intellect, emotion and brush.

Owner of his own truth, at the end of the performance, he gave himself to all the people who lived his message and who, as the minutes passed, coexisted with his pictorial production.

With astonishment, I look again at the work of Waldo Saavedra, and it is strange. I realize that, for the first time, I am going to write about it and, curiously, the direct and living experience that I always had of that work (and even yearnings and doubts of the creative process itself) is now replaced by this more distant and cold work: on my work table are crowded catalogs, photos, magazines, postcards, books. But there are also the memories. Waldo is more than those copies and than the memories. It is little less than an era what hangs from the cadence of his voice, of his handwriting, and of that perverse hedonism that his images still breathe.

From this side, my place, the other shore of so many, I can recognize the signs that invite me to attempt the aesthetic itinerary of this Cuban artist. Perhaps we suffer from topical obsessions, because, from here and there, the identificatory representations discuss the plastic surfaces, cling to any morphological whim, as if its concretion marked forever that belonging that comes as supreme suggestion.

To speak of bonds and defining experiences, declared in the work of Waldo, supposes making reference to some processes of our cultural avatar. His poetic discourse was forged in the heat of an aesthetic renewal, whose magnitude has set an unparalleled precedent in the domains of Cuban plastic arts.

(The "Cuban renaissance" or "prodigious decade").
Not everyone professed this creed, articulated fundamentally around the social roles of art and its mobilizing force. Under the aegis of this creative platform, a hard aesthetic was tempered with recognized conceptual roots, based on the value of the event and gesture nourished by emancipatory ideals, and indebted to the art-life line inherited from the historic avant-garde.

But, from its expressive openings, affirmed in a transgressive ideology, a cultural conduct was born that, since then, leads in symbolic practice. Its sign is to put that which serves the idea of arriving at its sensorial concretion.

This posture fostered a reticence to ways labeled by discourse, and cleared the aesthetic orthodoxies that have weighed on the artistic milestones of the main-stream.
Most interesting, however, is the response that this artistic orientation found in the pedagogical context, whose project (fundamentally at the Instituto Superior de Arte) promoted, together with reflection on contemporary culture processes, a capacity for resignification of such processes in the conditions of Cuban society and culture. This element has given singular freshness to our plastic arts. A solid academic formation backed by an open criterion of art, resistant to "mannerisms", and inciting a broad profile in artistic creation, has cut deep in the consciousness of creators.

Waldo has not escaped this tradition. With his peculiar way of operating in different media: painting, drawing, installations, he has not committed himself to a sense or way of being of art, but rather takes advantage of and uses all that heritage in function of one or another expressive need. In his favor he has, besides an unprejudiced will, a special intuition for design, and an enviable vocation for fabulating with plastic matter, and "a hand" that has guaranteed excellence in his already prolific work.

During the eighties in Cuba, this artist was a standard-bearer of the expansion of linguistic openings of plastic arts, in other domains of creation.

Set designs, design of record covers, artistic direction in proposals for film and video, contributed to the consolidation of a new visuality, with greater possibilities for socialization by this means. These forays into more democratic media than the usually elitist spaces of plastic arts and the known performance of the artist as an illustrator, equipped him with a capacity to give quick and effective solutions to the eye. His way of optimizing narrative resources, and of conceiving, from them, visual metaphors of high suggestive power, has given his work the faculty of being accessible to the general public, without easiness or insularity.

A visceral consumer of good music, Waldo quickly assimilated the seductive codes of advertising imagery, especially through record covers and posters. I still keep some specimens of cassette covers that he reproduced artisanally, saving the finish of a desired recording, based on originals that friends brought from different parts of the world. I think that, in addition to his gifts for almost photocopying any image, these exercises rooted his virtuosity, and educated his eye in that efficient and conquering economy of commercial design.

I even remember that he not only "copied" covers. His proto-experience as a professional designer was concretized with the ideas that the music of his favorites suggested to him. From all this practice, he accumulated graphic resources, and perfected that cultivated immediacy of message that his eye has achieved.

The expressivity of this creator is basically hybrid. Signs identifiable with expressionism, new figuration or pop, assault us from his forms. But, beyond the "warning signs" of cataloging aesthetics, are the recurring data that speak of his origins, of his sensation of being Cuban, islander and of a port.

The environment recovered and intervened by memory occupied a good part of his work in the early eighties. The sea and the tasks linked to it, the maritime atmosphere and the signs it leaves on people and things, served as supreme motif for his plastic sensitivity. At that time, he produced using collage, installation and some other media, but without abandoning drawing and painting, which he made converge with the new options. A fruitful lyrical vein consolidated itself as a distinctive feature of his creativity. The intimate metaphor took over the support, deploying its energy in poetic shreds of his vital experience.

"I am a painter who tells stories," he said in an interview. And it is true, Waldo has an undoubted narrative faculty, which is supported by a combination between the figurative sign, the expressionist brushstroke and the loose and intense stroke of informalist cut.

Another significant plane is the role he grants to the historically praised techné (exteriorization of virtuosity). The very act of manipulating expressive matter, of experiencing the pressure of the creative imprint, that tension between the subject and the material

Both interpreted as vital entities, are fundamental to appreciate and value his work.

Waldo, as a good Cuban who is not in contact every day with the fluids and currents of his sea, has also been bitten by nostalgia, this change of mood is reflected to a good extent in his recent production.

Intimate poetics has ceded ground to a more existential than reflective anthropological concern. The inquiry into identity processes takes precedence. The subject recognizes itself imbricated in the fabric of a cultural text that launches its identificatory clues. Crossings, transits, encounters, leave their traces of astonished gaze sometimes, discovering analogies other times, adventurous many. But always, the gaze of the walker, hunter of vestiges, virgin of original prejudice. But always, the lucid hope that "everything would start when something provokes it"

Source. Waldo Saavedra website