Preparing for Our America: Depicting Exile
How do artists visualize being separated from their homeland? I repeatedly ask this question as I assist with the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. The subject of exile is especially strong among Cuban American artists who began arriving on our shores in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. In works ranging from the personal to the political, historically engaged artists like Ana Mendieta, Maria Brito and Carlos Alfonzo creatively tackled their inability to return to the Cuba they left behind. Some, like Mendieta, visited Cuba but others refused to return, even temporarily, until the political status of their homeland changes. This summer, the museum acquired two paintings by the artist and elder statesman Rafael Soriano. Soriano chose to confront his traumatic break from Cuba through a series of imaginary journeys that led him to find safe haven in a spiritual realm dense with cosmic undertones.
Soriano favored abstraction since the late 1940s, but the rational and optimistic worldview that underpinned his geometric paintings was shattered after he arrived in Miami in 1962. Soriano found his way back to art by creating a new visual vocabulary infused with the three-dimensional qualities he had learned in his early training as a sculptor. By the early 1970s, these liminal spaces became inhabitable landscapes. In Un lugar distante (A Distant Place), Soriano finds the perfect jumping point to his later signature style. This landscape, suspended between the past and the future, functions both as a memory of a lost land and as a gateway to new imaginary adventures. Here Soriano handles painting with renewed sensuality as he animates the surface of the canvas with loose brush strokes and subtle impastos. The fiery yellows, radiant oranges, and rich browns suggest the warm atmosphere of the tropics. But Soriano also shows a flair for the fantastic. Futuristic forms populate Rafael Soriano's marvelous landscape, which along with the glowing sky, invite viewers to take a leap of faith and join the artist in his cosmic journeys. Visit the museum's blog Eye Level for the full post, and mark your calendars to see the film in the Our America exhibition next year (October 25, 2013 -- March 2, 2014).
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