I am the people: Manuel López de Oliva

October 24, 2019

the-people-are-me-manuel-lopez-de-oliva

The National Museum of Fine Arts was the venue to commemorate the 36 years of the René Portocarrero Screen Printing Workshop and present the screen print The People Are Me, by artist Manuel López Oliva.

The conversation was attended by printers from that institution, art critics, as well as officials and specialists from the Galerías Génesis and the Cuban Fund for Cultural Assets. Experiences from the realm of creation, the International Screen Printers' Encounters, authors and trends in this art in the 21st century, as well as the display of different generations and important Cuban artists, were some of the points of analysis for the panel. To which was added the exhibition of the original multiple of 50 copies; an image of a diverse and polysemic expression featuring masks characteristic of the artist's language and a brief video about the workshop's history. All of this as part of the celebration of Cuban Culture Day.

In an interview, López Oliva commented on the piece:

The screen print is titled The People Are Me, because it is based on a free version of a painting of mine titled Fuenteovejuna, which relates somewhat to the themes of that dramatic work by the Spanish Lope de Vega, where the protagonist role of the people in an event of its time is manifested. But it is not a simple illustration. It is not a work with a single meaning. Like all my pictorial and performative work carried out since 1992, I propose to spectators images that each one may assign the meaning or interpretation they believe or desire. All of my work is open, polysemic, dialogical. In this case I "play" with the notion of people, and I raise questions about it. Although I also address what is sometimes forgotten - that the majority of us artists are also "people," because we live, we have hope, we suffer and we rejoice just like the rest of the people.

In a baroque journey, where social and ethical themes emerge from characters and in games of appearances, his pieces have been based on stage theater, street theater, and the theater of life. Where masks form part of a practice in which López Oliva recreates problems of the contemporary world, its meditative and rational side. Thus, plural are the plastic paths and codes that are visualized, to express the philosophy of the human and the circumstantial.

With a work rich in symbols and codes, The People Are Me, is a world, a discourse, a search in which there are also desires, passions and encounters. In which the mask acquires that sensation of movement and gesticulation. Of easy decoding, acting as a transition or simulations, based on the changes of the characters.