Miami based Curator Elizabeth Cerejido on Cuban artist Glexis Novoa latest exhibition: Painting on Canvas

Exhibition Close-Up: Glexis Novoa: Painting on Canvas

Originally published by Cuban Art News . November 06, 2014

Independent curator Elizabeth Cerejido reflects on the change of direction in the artist’s current show

View of the exhibition Glexis Novoa: Painting on Canvas at Juan Ruiz Gallery
Courtesy Juan Ruiz Gallery

In Painting on Canvas, his current show in Miami, Glexis Novoa reconsiders a visual vocabulary he first developed in the 1980s and early 1990s. In her exhibition essay, independent curator Elizabeth Cerejido explores Novoa’s current work in light of his earlier art and his recent return to Havana.

Our thanks to Elizabeth Cerejido and Juan Ruiz Gallery for permission to translate and reproduce this essay, and to Virginia Soto for assistance with the translation.

Painting on Canvas, Glexis Novoa´s first solo exhibition at Juan Ruiz Gallery in Miami, is specifically noteworthy for the following revisionist aspects: 1) the artist's re-examination of an early period of his own work that was interrupted by exile in the mid-1990s; and 2) the place where the works were executed, which is Havana, where Novoa recently set up a studio after a twenty-year hiatus.  His return to the formal qualities of the Etapa práctica (the Practical Stage) and to the specificity of the Cuban context reveals poignant aspects of contemporary Cuban art today and the artist’s place in it.

Glexis Novoa has been a pioneering figure in contemporary Cuban art since the late 1980s. He belongs to the generation of artists who, along with the Volumen Uno group that preceded them, organized groundbreaking exhibitions challenging the status quo of the Cuban visual arts scene and the government's cultural politics. At times referred to as “the children of the Revolution” for being the first generation of artists to grow up under Fidel Castro´s socialist government, Novoa and his contemporaries ushered in contemporary art practices that drew on international trends such as Conceptual Art, Pop, and kitsch aesthetics.

While committed to art’s potential as an agent for social change, the artistic practices of the Volumen Unogroup, though unquestionably groundbreaking, remained limited to neat formal and conceptual propositions. Novoa instead pushed the envelope further by employing performative and interventionist strategies that, with cunning satire, went further in contesting the strictures imposed by Communist ideologies on the role of art in society. In his personal work, he created an artist persona and planned the development of two series: the Etapa romántica (Romantic Stage) of the mid-1980s) and the Etapa práctica (Practical Stage) of the late 1980s to mid-1990s. These works follow the artist’s transition from one who intentionally created bad and ugly works, lacking any formal decorum, to a period in which he purposefully displays his technical dexterity and commercial savvy. In the former series, Novoa often inscribed onto works on paper and canvas nonsensical phrases that appeared to be pronounced by an adolescent rather than by an artist who had received rigorous training in the visual arts at the ENA (National School of Arts).

Untitled (from the Etapa práctica), 1989, is an ambitious, large-scale installation that best culminates the work of this period. Initially it was exhibited at the 3rd Havana Biennial and is now in the collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). It comprises several canvases, and works on paper and other media, including abstract forms and structures evoking the Soviet-style aesthetics of political propaganda.  Masterfully made in a visual language that combines Expressionism, Constructivism and Social Realism, the altar-like arrangement of these various elements brings to the work's visual grandiosity an officialdom sanctioned by its visual state. Yet upon closer inspection, the signs and abstract forms making up the work are empty of any meaning, turning the impulse and armature of socialism into mere pattern.

Glexis Novoa, 1989 painting from the series Etapa práctica
Courtesy The Farber Collection

By co-opting a formal language at once familiar and attractive to local and international audiences, Novoa guaranteed his place in the then-burgeoning art market for contemporary Cuban art of the late 1980s, while unequivocally making a subversive commentary on a Communist ideology that was rendered vacuous and bankrupt by the end of the Cold War. Thus, from the Etapa práctica were borne the fundamental elements that have characterized Novoa´s work from that point throughout his career: the use of apocryphal symbols to comment on structures of power or what the artist himself refers to as la arquitectura del poder.

Nearly 30 years later, Painting on Canvas draws heavily on the combination of stylistic languages from this earlier period. Here, Novoa has abandoned the work in graphite of meticulously rendered imagined urbanscapes on marble and drywall, often as site-specific installations, for which he became known after permanently settling in Miami in 1994. However, the artist’s penchant for the graphic element is still present, evident in the Brutalist-style solid blocks and typeface that outline forms, letters, and symbols in heavy blacks, contributing to the works’ dramatic dimension. In this recent series, symbols that address the specificity of post-Soviet Cuba enter into dialogue with other elements equally painted in bold abstraction, which represent the influence of more universal and metaphysical concerns. Each work creates a subtle yet poignant commentary, literally layered with paint and figuratively with meaning, about the contradictory sociocultural, political, and economic realities of both the new Cuban context he encountered, and of his own personal and cultural identities.

Glexis Novoa, CUC, 2014
Courtesy Juan Ruiz Gallery

Consider the painting in which three letters spell out CUC: the acronym for Cuban Convertible Currency.  Unlike the apocryphal symbols from the 1990s, the letters CUC stand for something tangible and real: one of two official currencies that circulate on the island. Yet the manner in which they are painted, bluntly and strikingly occupying the center of the picture plane, seem an ominous reminder of the complicated sociopolitical and economic implications they embody. The CUC is the more valuable of the two currencies within the island, although it has no value on the international market and not all Cubans have access to it. [The Cuban peso, the other currency, is the one in which Cubans get paid.  However, it is valued at roughly 1/20 of the CUC. And while the CUC has no international value, it is used to control the flow of foreign currency within the island.] As a result, an increasing disparity has ensued, creating class divisions within Cuban society, where egalitarian socialist values give way to the rise of arbitrary and contradictory economic measures. Given their unstable meaning, Novoa transforms the letters CUC into abstractions, equally fictitious and decontextualized, characteristic of his overall work.

Glexis Novoa, Screw, 2014
Courtesy Juan Ruiz Gallery

Novoa revisits the relationship between figuration and abstraction or the reduction of political content to mere form in another recent painting, titled Screw. The work has its formal and conceptual antecedents in a large-format diptych that Novoa executed in 1991 as part of the series, Logros de la economía [Accomplishments of the Economy], also belonging to the Etapa práctica. Logros aimed to reduce the rhetoric of politics to mere abstraction. In that work, Novoa was referring to Fidel Castro's numerous speeches on the state of the national economy in which he would cite a litany of exaggerated figures meant to impress Cubans with their country's progress. The incomprehension of Fidel's repeated and exaggerated pronouncements, akin to “one million screws produced in such and such time," is visually represented as two minimalist, highly abstract versions of a screw. In the recent variant of that work, Novoa further deconstructs the idea of building a new society to a single image of a screw pointed downward, beautifully painted in an incandescent tone of aqua against the background of heavily applied dark purples and blues. The work's heightened formal qualities reveal the loss of meaning and disconnect between content and rhetoric.

Glexis Novoa, Dharma Wheel, 2014
Courtesy Juan Ruiz Gallery

Representing more personal and universal themes are works such as Dharma Wheel or Sutta, which reflect the artist's recent interest in Buddhism. The Dharma Wheel is Buddhism's most recognizable symbol as a religious and spiritual practice, but on a broader metaphysical level it is also associated with the cyclical nature of life and death. Novoa´s Dharma Wheel is an abstracted version of the more traditional representations of the symbol, reinforcing the artist's practice of deconstructing and re-interpreting content and meaning into evocative forms. Another reading of the Wheel, in the context of Novoa's new work, tempts one to read it as a metaphor for the artist's gestures of return, "coming full circle" to both place and content, with vastly renewed perspectives.

Glexis Novoa, Pesos Convertibles, 2014
Courtesy Juan Ruiz Gallery

Glexis Novoa, Deva I, 2014
Courtesy Juan Ruiz Gallery

The visual semiotic play that exists between Pesos Convertibles and Deva I provides a cunning example of the interchangeability of sign and signifier present in some of these works. Pesos takes the form of an eagle-like insignia as its principal figure, flanked on either side by the letters "P" and "C."  In Deva I—the Sanskrit name for deity—floating, amorphous, yet ambiguously recognizable shapes make up the work's overall composition. The horn-like designs of the central image echo the winged-like contours of Pesos. The visual equalizing of deity and currency attests to Novoa's interest of deconstructing mechanisms of power and hierarchy beyond their discursive potentiality. 

Installation view with Pesos Convertibles in foreground at right
Courtesy Juan Ruiz Gallery

The commingling of these signs also function to situate Novoa in his work as a transitional figure who navigates between two opposing yet increasingly intersecting contexts: Miami and Havana. In a broader sense, his acts of return also reveal the complexities that are operative in the production and consumption of contemporary Cuban art. As in Etapa práctica, Novoa plays into the power structures of the art market—this time, with the market's perception that the legitimacy of Cuban art is contingent upon where it is produced (Cuba), eschewing diasporic productions, and increasing transnational relations among Cubans in and outside the island that have been destabilizing previously rigid territorial and ideological demarcations. Novoa both reinforces and challenges those market biases by producing work in Havana intended to circulate outside the specific charge of its conceived site, and for the consumption of audiences in Miami. That Cuban artists in Cuba have been doing exactly that for decades not only compounds the ironies and contradictions inherent in such biases but also helps understand Novoa´s gestures of return as performative and strategic. Returning to these various aspects, Novoa's new series and its intended functions ultimately reveal the inherent tensions and inevitable interconnectedness between the local and global in today’s cultural production, as well as, the de-territorialization of nation and diaspora.

Glexis Novoa: Painting on Canvas runs through November 22 at Juan Ruiz Gallery in Miami.

— Elizabeth Cerejido

Elizabeth Cerejido is a Miami-based independent curator whose research interests include modern and contemporary Latin American art and photography, with an emphasis in Cuban and Cuban-American art and cultural politics. Cerejido is former assistant curator of Latin American and Latino Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and was curator at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University from 2002 to 2007.