Lying 90 miles off the Florida Keys, Cuba has been terra incognita for the past half century, a place made strange by geopolitics and proximity to these shores.
The same could be said of Cuba’s art scene, though contemporary Cuban artists have occasionally shown in New York galleries during the past 20 or 30 years. Now, as the result of the thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations and also of a larger project to backfill 20th-century art history (or, if you prefer, to introduce fresh product to the market), David Zwirner offers this museum-quality survey of paintings and sculptures by a heretofore unfamiliar group of midcentury modernists from the island nation.
Los Diez Pintores Concretos (the 10 Concrete Painters), as the movement called itself, was already trapped in amber during its period of busiest activity in the late ’50s/early ’60s. At a time when artists in the U.S., Europe and even Latin America transitioned from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, the artists here clung to a style of geometric abstraction developed earlier in the century. They considered their work political or at least utopian in its commitment to form, color and material.
In works by Mario Carreño, nonobjective elements fall together to create suggestions of figurative tableaux like those you’d find in the Surrealist work of Pablo Picasso. Sandú Darié visually channels Constructivism and, as in the case of his 1964 composition, Estructura (Structure), Suprematism. Wifredo Arcay’s paintings have a quirky appeal. And in a Luis Martínez Pedro piece from 1964, concentric bands of blues and greens evoke a whirlpool off Havana Beach with a chill, hypnotic vibe.
All of which is indicative of a buoyant optimism occasioned, no doubt, by the Cuban revolution’s early years, before the regime became a sclerotic satrapy within the Communist sphere of influence. One could make the case that the work is proof of the Castro government’s relative tolerance for modernism compared with that of its Soviet patron, and that’s great as far as it goes. But overall, the work is more historical curiosity than revelation, interesting but not moving in the sense of making viewers wonder why they’d never seen it before. These objects are nice enough to do well as inventory at Art Basel Miami, but in the end, an exotic provenance isn’t a guarantee of greatness.