Choco celebrates his 71st "birthday"

October 13, 2020

Unusual for the merriment and warm atmosphere, it was in that December of 2017 that the National Prize for Plastic Arts was awarded to Eduardo Roca Salazar (Choco), an artist who, in addition to great talent, possesses an enormous charisma that comes, without a doubt, from the nobility of his heart.

At the ceremony held in the theater of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Abel Prieto Jiménez, director of the Martiano Program, then Minister of Culture, highlighted the way in which this pure-blooded Santiago native is loved and admired, "for his simplicity, his humility, that dazzling quality of Choco for being so authentic."

That authenticity has been the hallmark of the artist who moves like a fish in water through painting, calography, installation, and sculpture, as we were able to appreciate once again in his most recent exhibition, organized at the end of 2019 in the Collage Habana gallery under the title Silences and Meditations, another that adds to the thirty personal shows held by him.

Even in the midst of this stage of personal distancing that must have hit him so hard, he found a way to fraternize, thanks to the Distancias conectadas project that, through social networks, allowed him to share space with other artists and draw closer, at least virtually, to the public.

The certainty of a forthcoming return to his Taller del Sol, located in the midst of the coming and going of the street of the same name in Old Havana, is certainly one of the gifts that will keep him happiest on this, the day of his 71st birthday or, rather, his "life day"; because Choco, like everything authentic, is protected from the tricks of time.