BACK Reinaldo Pagán Avila

MAN AS A PROJECT

“ I have lived a double life. To think, nobody ever taught me how to do it. Inanimate objects cannot tell the story, but they lived through it.

By Reinaldo Cedeño Pineda

--Daddy, ask that man for a little paint, whatever is left, I want to paint too.

 Ensueño neiborhood is one of the most coveted residential areas in santiago de Cuba. Its tranquility, geographical position and well preserved homes, many of which from the XX century, vouch for that.
 The event would take place there, where Reinaldo’s father lived, while a painter did a mural on a wall. The boy then would do his own.
   However, Reinaldo’s upbringing and training did not have this scenario alone, it went through a dual way.
 When his parents divorced, he is left to  mother Clara who lived in the highest part of town, in Vista Hermosa neiborhood, an older and popular place of swap-around wooden porches. A neiborhood of “typical” characters: the local bully, the santero....
 The artist’s hand took advantage of both these microworlds provided by destiny.
 “ I have retaken the idea from this popular ambiance in the humor, the irony  and in many of the characters which I mix with classical works; it was an environment that left a profound mark on me”.
 Sueño, the place I visited on my vacations, was the quiet part, more reflexive. I have lived a double life.
 “I do not feel ok by working one line only, I can be doing a trend dealing with details and then another one more expresionist, much looser. My art branches off into several directions, and  I am not biased to deal with one genra only. That can never strike you as strange.
 He was the chosen one for every drawing contest since and early childhood.  It seems nobody’s attention was drawn to his gift, all the more since his father, Luis Reinaldo, a well known photographer, was friends with such artists as Eleomar Puente and José Loreto Hourruitinier.
 “The smell of turpintine, revealed to me that I was working on a artist’s studio. And I liked the smell; to watch artists work... I was a quiet kind of boy, well withdrawn, and I liked to observe in the studios every brushtroke, or the patience in the photography lab”.
 “That was interpenetrating me ever since. And on top of that, my mother, who was never a painter, helped me correct my drawings with her natural talents”.
 
Cinderellas and Princeses

   Almost all through the 80’s, he studies at the José Joaquin Tejada Art School where he majored  as a Drawing and Painting Professor and minored as a professional in painting and drawing in 1990.
 “When I got into school, I had designs and shapes already in my mind, maybe that’s why some things were easy for me. But the ability to think in artistic terms  nobody ever taught me. I had to learn with the ups and downs of life. School taught me to streamline my trade, to polish it up. Painting was my forte, painting was a kind of an obsession for me”.
 “School was a experimenting stage, some of the tecniques I expected to develop were not taught because there were not materials, or tools or the professor to teach us. Many of the tecniques I learned from books or by experimenting myself. basically I learned water color painting after I left school”.
 “My father had many photography magazines, many art books. I took some pictures, but he was always near by and I checked and saw all his experimenting, however I never felt motivated by photography, not like painting.
 
--Perhaps  you saw in photography a Fine Arts Cinderella ? 

 “ No, Photography is an art that can be as profound as painting itself, and has been proved by many who have developed it as an art. The point is that most  photographers have devoted their work to commercial  photography.
 Photography has no boundaries, not only in terms of experiments with chemicals, but in montage, the framing, color effects or the combining of photography with painting.
 Not in photography, but in the cinders of fine arts other forms would keep him company. In a  kind of revenge-sweet-revenge, Reinaldo took upon himself to turn the an assumed Cinderella into a Princess: water color painting. He had no other magic wand than his own brush.
 “I was not taught water color painting as profoundly as I would have. Water color painting has been frowned upon, because it has been assumed as a tecnique in which no permanent master piece can be performed in; but as a sketch medium, a step leading to perform the work as such in oil, acrylic paint or other technique”.
 “There are only a few a painters who have taken water color painting to such high standards, with an idea, a concept with all the content necessary for a master piece to be produced”.
 “I set myself the task of take water color to the last consequences, I started with carbon drawing which nobody was doing back then”.
 “As materials were scarse, I started water color painting with one technique. It’s rather difficult to see a water color painting in a contest in gallery. And I was able to get awards with my water colors in the November 30th gallery”.
 “I developed the subject line that I alawys had worked on, using the very same post-modernist codes and using a mix of national elements”.
 “Some would say that it was not water color painting  because I used the color white. They used to say that I mixed it with other things, that I used pencils, because it seemed incredible the manner in which I used water color, and I took it to high standards. There is a series called Cultural Policy, and, another one titled The Table is Ready.
  “These topics are related to art itself--with art for a  market, I mean--a topic that has always has got my attention”.
 “I believe you can use any technique and do the most updated sort of work.  Water color have been used through the years to make sketches and it has been landscape artists who have given a prominent place to this tecnique; but it does not mean I can not do a contemporary work with it. There are two ways about water color: the wet type mostly used and the dry form which I learned from books”.
 
MARAT’S ONE HUNDRED DEATHS.

  Jean Paul Marat ( 1743-1793 ) was a famous doctor, columnist and hero of the French Revolution. Charlotte Corday, a fanatic, showed up as a girondine in need of protection, and was received by Marat in his own bath room, where he usually tried treated a skin desease. Then the Corday woman pulled a knife from under her garment and stabbed him to death.
 Juan David, the painter, stopped short the useless, sudden and unexpected death, turning inmortal all the tragedy he portrayed in the mids of the uproar of the the pioneering revolution.
“For me, it is one of the finest works of art in the History of the Arts due to the composition of colors, the dramatic character of a sublime topic, you see? Sometimes I substitute the element of Marat himself by a manikin, because what I really care about is the concept that is conveyed”.
 Pagán’s work takes elements from the famous master piece and others with different styles and schools. .
 He rather refers to this form as manipulation, despite the polisemic and questionable character of the term, should we take expand the meaning beyond fine arts.
 “The manipulation of the work is not limited to the classical work. My work is based on multiple quotations from the history of the arts, in places you can see Picasso, a flemish or barroque work”.
 “There is some sort of anacronysm in my work. I try to achieve a cohesive environment and not a too evident gap in my work, or it can be located in a criollo background, as it is the case with The Christ of the Hammock. It is a Christ who is no longer a Christ, he is taken from a flemish work;  he is a guajiro* ( local cuban term for a country folk), with a machete in hand, lying on a hammock”.
 “We assume he rests after a day’s work, maybe after cutting sugar cane, and it is sort of a double metaphor, the suffering on account of such difficult work”.
 “ Marat’s death is a well known master piece, but the titles of my works related with it, change the context for the work”.
 “You can convene a a hundred painters, to develop works from David’s Marat and none of the hundred painters ould do the same. Retaking elements from an well know  work, you can make it original a hundred times”.
 “I have used Marat repeatedly because I have had in mind a series while using a single quotation, and want to be  able to paint fifty and one hundred works, totally different one from the other, even though they may have the same reference”.
 “When we talk about manipulation, I am refering exactly to what others refer to as appropiation and yet others call decontextualization; but I rather use the term manipulation, because  what you are really doing is manipulating things that already exist in art’s reality. You manipulate styles that others have used or created; however clear it may be that when you appropiate these  styles and forms it is done in order to create a new work”.
 
--Are you not afraid that these manipulation may permeate your work with codes foreign or too known , or that this reusage may cause your personal style to be concealed , or be disfigured after so many manipulations?

  “I am not concerned about that. My inmediate worry is to be able to express myself. In my work what I am most concerned about is the idea conveyed, and I know everything will be under the influx of my mind, from my thoughts and the manner in which I assume all”.
 “The way in which I build the idea as I take certain codes in the history of arts, it is like a methodology which I create when I shape my work”.
 “I take things already made to express my own concepts, everything I think from my point of view. What I am most concerned about is being myself, and being able to communicate. It is like a chair: what I am most concerned about is that you can sit on a chair comfortably, never minding if one arm is barroque, the back part from the Renaisance or the legs surrealist.
 
Double Metaphor.

   Reinaldo Pagán Avila can not crack a joke easily, he is a philopher humorist, he deals with reflexion, even black humor. On the contrary, his introversion, his “talking silence” make all his trodding charge to be avalanched on his series and canvasses.
 “No matter the subject I deal with, he deals with social criticism, with reflexive humor implicit, irony”.
 His closest friends know about his concentration above all. He does not go for attention, he radiates it. His son, Wilban seems to follow his dad’s footsteps. His characters are the people he meets daily. He is not comitted to materials or schools, nor does he follow rules or idols.  After his silence, the misfit has the floor: “if the message gets to me, if what I see touches me, I like the work, regardless the school. I customize the tecnique and the form to the idea”.
 Reinaldo Pagán’s first exposition was named My Double Face. With a coin-like format, by appropiating the style,  figures and lettering  of a coin, obverse and reverse, so to speak, he casts a detailed and nitpicking look on Cuban reality.                      
  But things did not stop there; there was a second part, this time around caricatures and it was called:  The Other Face.     Let us not be surprised; he was warning us of his multiplicity in expressing himself. Even his first award at a national level ( 1993 ) was granted to him in the Aquelarre Contest-the top contest in graphic humor in Cuba--besides one of the awards in the Olsense Karteenale Exhibition  in Belgium in 1996.
  The second exhibition took place at the Prairie of Sculptures, a gigantic open space decorated with huge volumetric works by artists from a variety of countries in Baconao Park, the great natural reserve.  It turned into a humorous and spicy exposition as it made use of falic elements and homeland symbols. “The idea behind the exposition was a comical way to view some elements of  cultural policy, and perhaps some things were not properly understood, as they were placed out of context”.
 
--Why is there a constant reference to the manikin or the puppet ?

 “ It was part of a series to be called Project for the Death of A Burocrat. It’s criticism to a number of things, mainly to a trend of comitting projects to paper and to leave them there as a work in itself, even though it is never brought to fruition”.
 “It is a reference to the utopical, to the unfinished and it is also a philosophical concept. Man for me is an unfinished project. Man is a project to be finished, because there are a thousand questions, millions of doubts which have not been clarified or given solutions to, and such is also the case of the questions concerning man’s own existence”.
 “If you take up the religious way, man was created by God, and then we would be God’s puppets. If you are an atheist then you are subject to power and laws... you are still a puppet of destiny. Man is still  finding  himself”.
 
--And religious images are still with you, but Christ in a very peculiar manner...
 
“...Look, the Flemish School of painting is one of the most interesting in the world of painting, and one that has contributed the most to the world of art. I have become very interested in their technique, and also on the fact that it has a fully  religious nature, above all the prerenaisance trend.
 “I was interested in taking for myself some of the elements of religious painting of the Flemish School, such as: the angels, their Christs... I take them all out the religious contexts...it is just a quotation. even though you see a Christ, for instance a Christ like the Christ in the Hammock, it is a symbolic Christ, he is a human being. who lives an actual life in poverty, limitations...and as a result of this, there can be suffering as great as that of Christ’s. It’s all metaphoric”.

--Talking about encounters, Why have you established a link with Japanese engraving, which  seems, at least on the surface is so unconnected with arts in this geography or this time?

  “That quotation to Eastern art is a double metaphor. The eastern world has always been discriminated by the Western world, and in Cuba it is easier to reach the mass media from the capital city than from our eastern part of the country, I know that all too well. Wherever there is one of these characters, the eastern element is also present in a double manner”.
 “Japanese engravings are very lineal; colors are flat even though I go around this, because I paint characters that have volume already; I mix the elements from one culture with the other. My work is a hybrid”.
 
--But hasn’t that very thing made it possible for you to condense an authenticity which in a more cosmopolitan city would have been more polluted ?

“... Maybe...in some way, those of us working outside Havana, outside the things that are being worked there, can absorb this, and here you can be doing a more national work. Art without imitating the trends in vogue, even though in these times everything is worthwhile. Life here is kind of slower... and that makes you go into the inside of people, deeper into the people”.

--There is another series called: We are Innocent, which also deals with man in his future potentialities, about children, but I believe that the artist’s look is not so innocent...

“...Look, the idea comes to me as I was going to be a father, when my wife was pregnant. There is the process of getting a cradle, all you have to live through in this context. I try to put myself in his shoes, how he must feel as child in his closure in a craddle and play pen.
 “ Generally an adult does not think that there was a time when he was a child, and in a way it is a metaphor supported in innocence. The title We are Young is something ironic, maybe at this stage we are innocent, but it is obvious that from my stand point there is no innocent look.
 “ I see things from a different angle, it is also reflexion about human beings. It can help me both, for a poster or a the title of a song. I feel I have the gift to manipulate anything, I am always ruled by an idea which I’m willing to induce in my paintings”.
 
--Also sugar canes ?
  
  “I fundamentally work on series, in the case of sugar canes, it was a project with the title: If Sugar Canes Could Talk, because I believe everything, every tree, has a story of its own, and have lived the history of events. Men are the ones that tell the story. Inanimate beings, naturally, can not tell the story, but they lived through it. History is told from different points of view. Only the wood on which Jesus was crucified and the cloth which was wrapped around him can accurately tell the true story”.
 “ You have been in a sugar cane plantation and you know is a hard place,  it is an appropiate location for playing pranks, to hide or indulge in pleasant things,  like making love. My work is like asking the sugar canes to tell the story”.
 
Postmodernism is an Ajiaco.

  Ajiaco is a traditional Cuban dish where a variety of meats and  root vegetables, with the participation of the knowledge from different cultures, are mixed to produce an exquisite taste to the palate, in which ingredients have lost their own particular taste to the thickness of the broth.  
  The cuban expert anthropologist Don Fernando use it as a simile to refer  to Cuba, to its identity.
 The dish is a made-ready element to be used for definitions, because for our artist, postmodernism in Cuba is like an ajiaco.
  “Postmodernism in Cuba is like Cuba itself. Cuba is an ajiaco. It has always been, since the threshold of arts in the island, it has been nourished from artistic echoes from other parts of the world.  For instance, the Cuban Academy was founded by Nicolas de la Escalera and Juan Bautista Vermey, a french citizen. Cuba has always assimilated foreign trends , but has put them in their own “pot” and has “cook”them in their own way. Postmodernism in Cuba is in the idea, Cuba’s modernity is sui generis”.
 Reinaldo joined other Santiago painters like Yuri Moreno and Orestes Campos to make up the group Cara-jo, which can  be translated as young faces ( Cara in Spanish, meaning face and joven, meaning young, therefore medial clipping gives us  Cara--jo­* ) , and there is also play upon words, refering to a rather jocose phrase in Spanish, meaning a distant an unknown place or maybe a four letter word (Carajo, meaning the end of nowhere.)     
 “ As a rule, groups work on a single work, we are three artists... painters.. but each of us has a distinct line of work, his own point of view and the good thing about it is that the topic is analyzed and then distributed”.
  “We are always trying to make ourselves known, and we have a number of projects we have not been able to bring about due to financial dificulties”.
 “The purpose of Cara-jo is purely artistic. We also have animated cartoon and movie projects”.
 Critics have permeated themselves of the originality of the works, even though at times there have been dificulties with  promoting the work or the process may look asistematic or lacking catalogues.
 “ Almost everybody has words of praise for my work. My work is apparently hedonist. In my idea, the opinions I look for the most, are the ones that have to do with the message in itself, those that tresspass the mere esthetic enjoyment of the piece, that concentrate on the pleasure of the ingenuity of the idea. You see what I mean ?
 “Everything is like embellishing what comes from behind, but it does not mean I am not interested in people enjoying my work. There are painters who have a wonderful technique, but when you delve deep, you realize that  everything is just surface, everything stays at the dermis and the work is hollow. It is like a woman who can be beautiful, but when you talk to her she does not make sense at all”.
 “I think about the idea before I start doing my work, and even the tittle of it, I have it before. I think about the title and then I paint my work. I never paint unless I am motivated, and the circumstances in which I paint do not matter at all”.
 It can be weeks before I paint, because I can be reading, listening to music, writing.  I have to fall in love with the idea before bringing it to life. I paint very quickly, I solve my paintings very quickly. What really drags me along is the shape, when an idea comes flowing, I have the whole series.
 December, 8th is the day of Our Lady of the Rosary in the catholic religion.                 
   Maybe his parents, Clara and Luis Reinaldo expected a girl, maybe to name her “Charito”; but on that date in 1971, a boy was born to them and very much so: Reinaldo Pagán Avila. In his endless fountain of color and ideas, sometimes everything flows so fast  that there is no physical time to conclude groups of works or single works. His silent is fertile. The present is a flame burning in his pocket, and the future can already be seen in his eyes.