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Arts

The freedom of imagination

An exhibition of magical works by two Cuban artists shows they are not bound by borders, despite being unable to travel with their art.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published March 13, 2005

	[Images from the Gulf Coast Museum of Art]
	Alfredo Sosabravo, Homage to Hundertwasser, 2003, oil and collage on canvas.
	Flora Fong, Banana Plantation, 2000, oil on canvas.

LARGO - Be prepared for sensory overload, in a good way. "Out of Cuba" at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art is rich with images, dense with texture and color supplied by its two Cuban artists, Alfredo Sosabravo and Flora Fong.

From the title, you might think they have left Cuba. But no, only their paintings have left the country, and for a temporary visit, having to travel by way of South America. The artists could not travel because, I am told, they were denied visas.

Though geographical boundaries and diplomatic exigencies have been observed, Sosabravo and Fong seem to have found an internal creative niche without borders or politics. This is a meditation on islandness. If life in Cuba is grim, you will not find much evidence of it in their art. (Except for some storm-swept canvases of Fong's, they could as easily apply to west-central Florida.)

That said, Fong's landscapes have an intriguing dark side to them and a sense of instability that comes, perhaps, from living on an island. The subject matter certainly does. The central imagery is often floated in the canvas' center, isolated by a wash of color and framed like a painting within a painting. Stylized palm trees are always in motion, fronds telling us which way the wind is blowing and used as tropes for other natural elements.

Proportions are stylized, too, as in Banana Plantation, in which a bunch of bananas in a luscious stage of ripening, with the fecund red flower attached, is swagged between and beneath smaller palms and another oft-used image, telephone poles. The poles and the occasional suggestion of buildings are the only references to human presence, and they are usually painted in a precarious state; forces of nature rule here. Fong has said she wants to reconcile the duality of her heritage, Cuban and Chinese, in her art. So she mutes the sensual sweep of her colors with a calligraphic sobriety, making of her palms and telephone poles linear reductions that are a form of language.

White Hen, though less abstract, uses the same theme of containment, actually penning a brood in claustrophobic company with a strutting, plumed rooster. Like the single black fish swimming away from the red fish in The Countercurrent, the white hen is the anomaly, perched on a ledge, alert and poised to escape, unlike her more passive brown-feathered sisters.

Sosabravo has no brooding dichotomies. He, too, oversimplifies his forms, but, rather than purging them into abstractions, he fills them with pattern. Works from the late 1990s rely on paint; in more recent ones, he collages fabric onto parts of the canvas, using a blanket stitch to impose some order on the riot of his crazy-quilt visions that read like waking dreams.

But his art shares with Fong's the idea of an island as a fragile, self-contained universe. He is a Prospero, conjuring mermaids and creatures from the sea. The shores on which they land are magical places of wheeling circus wagons and strange whirligigs. Human faces are either hidden by masks or bear amplified, generic features as if personality, too, were an illusion. Like Paul Klee's, Sosabravo's work is both consciously naive and sophisticated.

Fantastic Infantile Dream shows a man, presumably the artist, balanced on a boat hovering between sea and land, bisected by a train belching blue smoke inscribed with random letters like automatic writing. Sosabravo's application of paint is so outrageously elaborate that it competes with the patchwork of fabrics he uses intermittently, like exclamation points for this fantasy. The man throws up his hands in wonderment, or perhaps as a magician's command, while a bird looks on, a question mark over its head as commentary.

In Homage to Hundertwasser, Sosabravo honors another Klee inheritor, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, an Austrian painter whose colorful spirals were like gardens infested with social ironies, another type of illusion.

As bright and colorful as it is, Sosabravo's island is not Edenic. The Destruction of the Tower of Babel is about as violent as the collapse of the World Trade Center. The tower, a construct of the artist's "threads" of paint embellished with trompe l'oeil stitching, is coming apart at the seams, spilling its guts (reminiscent of the gears in Charlie Chaplin's City Life) and spewing body parts, animals and items from everyday life: a pair of glasses, a jagged knife, straws. Only a flying fish seems to make it out alive.

Perhaps it's a message more specific than a generalized hubris. As Prospero, the conjuror of Shakespeare's Tempest, admitted, "I have bedimmed the noontime sun, called forth the mutinous winds and twixt the green sea and azure vault set warring war . . . by my so potent art . . . this rough magic."

Artists offer us their versions of reality all the time, some with a technical realism that can seem subversive. Not so Sosabravo or Fong. We all share this big old island floating in space, but these painters acknowledge perceptions that can keep us worlds apart.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

"Out of Cuba: Alfredo Sosabravo and Flora Fong" is at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, 12211 Walsingham Road, Largo, through May 1. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. $5 adults, $4 seniors, $3 students and free to children 10 and younger. (727) 518-6833.

[Last modified March 10, 2005, 10:46:02]