Kcho is at Bellas Artes with "En ningún lugar como en casa"

December 24, 2020

Reaching half a century of existence and celebrating it with an anthological exhibition in the Cuban Art building of the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA) is a pleasant privilege for Kcho (Nueva Gerona, Isla de la Juventud, 1970), an artist who over three decades has created works endowed with great symbolic and human significance and rooted in the evolution of the nation.

This is a perennial homage to Wifredo Lam's The Jungle, to the great masters and to the great utopia of art for which he has lived, states Jorge Fernández, director of the MNBA.

There is no place like home is a project long cherished for many years. The exhibition was to open last Sunday, April 19, but it was not possible due to the increase in COVID-19 cases in Havana and other cities around the world. Finally, this exhibition sees the light, bringing together Kcho's most well-known works alongside others made abroad that have never been seen by the public of the Greater Antilles.

Corina Matamoros, curator of the exhibition, affirms that this constitutes a great opportunity to assess Kcho's trajectory, his entire journey and the most important milestones in the career of a very singular artist who, through hard work and talent, managed to establish himself in the national and international circuit.

Already in 1991, during the IV Havana Biennial, he exhibited for the first time at Fine Arts and from that same venue, in 1992, at only 22 years old, he impressed specialized critics with the exhibition From the Landscape, which stood out for the powerful force with which he dialogued about Cuban reality, appropriating its context and its relationship with the sea—given by its double insularity—through the use of natural materials and recycled products that linked him to the movement known as arte povera.

"The artist must create with responsibility and without fear," states the one who throughout his prolific career has had to face misunderstandings of the discourse he attempts to convey.

Such was his interest in products discarded by man that, at a moment in his youth, those who saw him filling wheelbarrows on the banks of the Almendares River or near the Malecón called him crazy without imagining that with those raw materials he would elaborate a good part of his sculptures and installations, some of which the Museum currently keeps in its collection.

Given its magnitude, the anthological exhibition There is no place like home spans multiple areas of the Cuban Art building. This is how he conceived it, along with Corina, from a curatorial perspective.

In the exterior areas of the building, various sculptures made of steel will be placed. In the courtyard will be located most of the installations and sculptures with greater volumes and dimensions.

On the external part of the transitional room, on the third floor, a large part of the work developed by the community cultural project Kcho estudio Romerillo, Laboratory for Art, which belongs to the Playa municipality, will be exhibited. From there, contemporary art works treasured by one who set out to transform a neighborhood of need in order to promote proactive attitudes among its residents and their civic participation, traveled to the MNBA.

"After 30 years of work it is good to feel that everything one has done has a clear objective. Today, thanks to that, we can tell this story, I believe, in the most coherent way possible," he assures.

That is why he will share with the public processes from his moments of creation in solitude. Within the transitional room, pieces from the Faces of Travelers to an Old World series will be enjoyed.

Likewise, two new series of drawings will be able to be seen, some created for a project he was unable to carry out in China and others more recent fruits of his stay in Barcelona, Spain. He has kept all his sketchbooks with sketches of his works from 1989 to the present, because for Kcho, drawing accompanies his entire creative process as a form of prior and subsequent thought.

It will be a surprise to see him paint in situ on some papered walls of the room. Also, if epidemiological conditions permit, he intends to put at the disposal of national and foreign engravers the resources of the experimental graphics workshop Romerillo, this time moved to the Museum courtyard to turn it into a large open-air laboratory.

He is grateful to all those who in these difficult, but very intense, years have been part of his life: to his teachers from Isla de la Juventud and to the professors of the National School of Art from which he graduated as a painter in 1990.

Kcho has been one of the few chosen who has been able to display his poetics in such exclusive venues as the Museums of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Chicago, both in the United States. In the year 2000 his installations were at the National Museum Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, Spain.

He has also represented Cuba on several occasions at the ARCO Fair in Madrid as well as at the Venice and São Paulo Biennales. In 1995 he received the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts for the body of his work.

The anthological exhibition There is no place like home has the sponsorship of the National Councils of Plastic Arts and Heritage. It will be open to the public from December 3 to April 21, 2021.