Also Cuban, belonging to a much posterior generation, Roberto Carril Bustamante traces in ‘The naive’ the story – lived and suffered – of his countryman Reinaldo González Fonticiella, a cursed artist whose plastic work claims in a research and veneration work that occurs this Sunday in the Eugenio Trías library, of the Madrid Park of the Retirement, at midday twelve.
Unlike Carril Bustamante, who left Castroism to settle in Madrid, Fonticiella never fled the island: his was an inner escape, until he settled in the creative silence in which he locked himself after destroying his work. There was nothing left. Next to nothing. His was not only a protest, one of many, but a genuine act of creation through destruction. Born in Zaza del Medio in 1927 and the son of a Tenerife based on the island, Fonticella did not take to spread from the currents that, from Europe, tried to subvert the order of the arts, some avant -garde that led him to contact a group of creators – Antonia Eiriz, Tomá Yanes– whose hand explored the ways of his own revolution. First he collided with Batista and, confident in the liberation represented by Fidel Castro’s soflamas, finally suffered ostracism and the condemnation of a totalitarian regime whose idea of art – Simple and monumental propaganda, tragic realism – did not admit another dream than that of lies.
It was in 1962 when Reinaldo González Fonticiella began to perform sculptures from recycled materials. Only those chosen by the regime of Havana were supplied with punctuality of what is necessary to develop, to the dictation, their plastic works. Apart from the officiality, Fonticiella has been working with the waste of an impoverished and prison ‘Artistic suicide’ of destroying his work. ‘The naive’ tells the story, one of many, all unrepeatable, of whom until his death in 2002 he wanted to dream on an island forced not to paste an eye.
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