# Angel Laborde, Plastic Artist, Died in Guantánamo

**Date:** 01/05/2023

The accomplished master of plastic arts Ángel Laborde Wilson, known as the painter of shells and singular exponent of creative spiralism, passed away in this city at the age of 80.

Born on December 18, 1942, Laborde began his studies in 1962 at the National School of Art in La Habana and upon graduating in 1967 became one of the first graduates of that emerging School.

In that initial class and subsequent courses he coincided with other notable Cuban creators, including the current National Prize winners for Plastic Arts Nelson Domínguez and Ever Fonseca, and together with the latter, Rafael Quenedit and some others, between 1975 and 1985, he was part of the Antillano Group, earning the admiration of all as a companion of technical mastery and undeniable mark.

He moved with skill between painting, drawing, caricature, sculpture and ceramics, a specialty for which he received postgraduate studies in the past decade of the 70s, in the former Czechoslovak Republic, and which enabled him to later form part of the faculty of the San Alejandro Academy in La Habana.

A dozen schools in Cuba bear witness to Laborde's pedagogical legacy, and for his contribution to the development and teaching of visual arts in his province he is considered vital in that sphere.

The shape of the shell, always in ascending movement, became throughout all these years his spiritual and creative philosophy, which he outlined by synthesizing forms, based on expressivity in the strokes and contrasts of tempered colors inspired, in search of balance, in the golden or logarithmic spiral, derived from geometry and described as important in the history of art."

"My art is based on creative spiralism. I use that singular form of the multicolored guantanamera polimita, of the sonorous rosy conch of the Guamo, the ear, the universe, the galaxies, thought or time, and I give it faces of mestiza women, Latin American, always attached to the human, the social, the Cuban, the creole," he stated on one occasion to the Agencia Cubana de Noticias.