Alberto Lescay's Perpetual Journey

August 1, 2018

On the occasion of Alberto Lescay Merencio's 50 years of artistic life, the gallery of the José Martí Memorial, in Revolution Square in Havana, hosts a wide exhibition of his work that includes not only oils and drawings, but several sculptures, in fact, impeccable busts of Cuban patriots.

Inaugurated there on Friday, July 20, at 7:00 p.m., the exhibition displays the formal mastery, among other factors, of the work of this irreducible santiaguero whose perception of the homeland reaches an extremely original aesthetic category.

In his opening remarks, writer Omar González traced a picture of the birth of his versatile plastic production and laid the groundwork for understanding not only the artist's stylistic will and his exceptional rigor, but his acute sensitivity for capturing and gathering, as his own, the essences of Cuban history that he learned to love from his childhood, which took place in the hills of a city like Santiago, eternally rebellious and legendary.

The values of Alberto Lescay's sculpture are well-known and appreciated, conceived as an integral part of public spaces that, incidentally, acquire, in his hand, a new functional dimension and, of course, linked to the most legitimate exaltation of island values. Examples of this craft of his are the effigy of Antonio Maceo, located in the center of Santiago's Revolution Square, as well as the more recent figure of Mariana Grajales, stylized by the airs of her lineage, alongside the monument dedicated to the memory of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, at the entrance of the Santa Ifigenia cemetery, sanctuary of national rebellion.

In Perpetual Journey, we can enjoy a series of busts of historical figures ranging from the face of Ernesto Che Guevara to that of Lieutenant Pedro Sarría Tartabull, of the Rural Guard, who, in the days following the assault on the Moncada, finds Fidel asleep next to two of the attackers, the three of them sheltered in a vara en tierra already in the rural areas near Santiago. The transparency of the bust is moving in expressing the tender kindness of that honorable military man. At the foot of the bust an inscription: "Ideas are not killed."

Alberto Lescay from a point on the Earth —which is the city of Santiago— invites us on this perpetual journey through love of homeland values and the need for art as the supreme expression of those values. As only those who constantly live surrounded by sea and blue mountains know how to do it, in their natural setting: the Caribbean. The Casa del Caribe of Vista Alegre, in Santiago de Cuba —at its most recent Festival— saw fit to also sponsor the exhibition Navigate, a face-to-face between Alberto Lescay Merencio and Eduardo Roca Salazar (Choco), National Prize for Plastic Arts 2017.