<H.<itI~&tt9 dO#lt@W8f30t~%~-/kit9 d@ftt@t Buffalo, New Yoik Big Orbit Gallery and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center are a telescope, Rey's perspective on his past is lucid, showing pleased to host the dual-site exhibition My Private Addiction to clear evidence of the Cuban condition, but is vignetted by the Lies by Cuban-born, Western New York artist Alberto Rey. This effects of distance and time. While highly charged with showing comprises a dynamic survey of the artist's most recent personal invocations of Cuban identity, his vision has been work and is accompanied by a comprehensive essay entitled moderated by the missing context provided by direct experi- 'Reappropriating Paradise" by Dr. Johanna Drucker. The ence. curators and artist would like to extend their personal grati- tude to Johanna for her insightful comments and contribution In 1998, thirty-six years after leaving as a child, Alberto Rey to this exhibition and catalogue. returned to Cuba for the first time. During his visit Rey ab- sorbed a flood of direct experience which forced him to con- For the last twelve years the work of Alberto Rey has at- template the depictions of "reality" and "nostalgia" expressed tempted to reconcile the disparate pieces of his Cuban- in his work. The new perspective achieved as a result of his American identity through an uneasy fusion. Born to Cuban trip compelled Rey to see himself and his work in a different exiles who received political asylum through Mexico and moved light. Rey now states that his artistic practice results in the to America when he was a child, Rey has been limited to a ''creation of lies" - born out of a need to embrace a reality remote sensing of Cuban culture, its history and private which is not necessarily the truth. Although Rey continues to legacies. This traverse-gazing onto his heritage creates an struggle with this revelation, his belief in the artistic process's underlying sense of longing and desire in his work. It also power to bring fulfillment, spirituality, and personal under- illuminates the gaps and subtle inaccuracies inherent within standing remains strong. For personal history is history con- the formation of his cultural identity, an identity cultivated by tinually and ultimately defined by the self, shaped by but not his family's exile and search for a community in America. As a relegated to one's culture, family narrative, and collective result, Rey purposefully riddles his work with spliced together experience. On this course of self discovery, Rey continues to narratives and hybrid images. elucidate his artistic vision. His challenge to the viewer is in exposing the mediating forces acting upon cultural identifica- At the core of Rey's work is a romantic observation on the . tion and revealing the precarious realities which add up to a multiple forces acting upon the development of personal sense of self. Ultimately, Rey would contend, identity can only identity and history, past and present. Rey's depictions of his be perceived as a sort of Platonic absolute, existing, but only homeland and ancestry resonate with an inherently Cuban indirectly experienced in the shadows. cosmography, and with his ever-present sense of isolation from it. As an insiderloutsider to the native Cuban experience, his -Martin Kruck, Co-Curator, Big Orbit Gallery early exposure to Cuban culture was made real only through - Sean J. Donaher, Director, Big Orbit Gallery interpolated ancestral narratives and then only echoed by - Sara Kellner, Visual Arts Director, other Cuban-Americans. Like the view down the wrong end of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center Fly Sheet: Excerpt from Cuban Diary, Watercolor on Paper, June 1998 Reappropriating Paradise hostile to Fidel Castro's revolutionary contemporary sensibility in an uneasy projects. For this community, Cuba is but richly tense hybrid aesthetic. The The visionary quality of Alberto Rey's the Garden from which they have been history of modern western art has work carries a strong emotional charge banished. The two projected images never had a comfortable relation with in its blend of nostalgia, tradition, and that Rey uses to frame the Hallwalls the kind of iconography that Rey innovation. Rey's imagery is pervaded space makes this clear: a waving palm borrows from Cuban and Latin with an atmospheric moodiness that tree against a tropical horizon faces the traditions, nor with the longings he immediately betrays its themes of loss image of an endlessly dripping faucet, expresses in the black and white and faith, distance and recuperation. an image of despair, futility, and waste. landscapes of a country from which he Throughout the monochrome Rather than address the politics of is displaced by temporal and landscapes and focused features of his these mythologies-those of the geographical distance, nor with the portraits comes a sense of intense paradise lost, the reality regained, the religious imagery and faith that appear longing. It is as if the entire of his nostalgic tales and emotionally charged in various of his series. And for this practice were charged with the task of accounts, Rey lets the gap remain. A reason Rey is particularly interesting at compensation for a paradise long lost huge, submerged continent of historical this moment in time, since his work and barely able to be conjured into reality, the period of the last four doesn't fit within modern traditions or existence through the fraught exercise decades, lurks beneath Rey's images. within the formulaic terms of of appropriation. In the current Rather than address the discrepancies postmodernism's easy refusal of those exhibition at Hallwalls and Big Orbit, between the dreams of his parents' critical frameworks. If postmodernism Rey is exhibiting work from three generation and the realities of challenged modern autonomy with a series: Cuban Portraits, Studio Retablos, contemporary life, he chooses a path of critical sense of contingency, and work and A~~ro~riatedMemories. Each of aesthetic reconciliation at the level of of artists engaged with identity politics these series shares with the others a imagery. challenged the generalizations of hybrid aesthetic sensibility through postmodern criticism with a sense of which Rey is enacting a cultural and Painting becomes the means by which specific history, then Rey challenges private act of suture, trying to piece Rey remakes his own connection to the the secular politics of contemporary art back together a fractured reality that mythic past, not the real, nor the Real, with a resistant faith and carefully finally cannot be reconstituted across but to some image of a Cuba from considered nostalgia, verging on the breaks of history, politics, and time. landscape paintings of another century, escapism. In place of direct to modes of portraiture steeped in engagement with the politics of The drive toward these acts of convention and tradition, and to the contemporary Cuba, Rey investigates recuperation, the reappropriation of a religious imagery that provides a link the spaces of displaced memory, the lost paradise, is rooted in Rey's between the secular and the spiritual. kqc!j of a paradise recalled through the personal experience as the child of But these are all motifs of linking, longings of others, mediated by their Cuban exiles. He left Cuba as a three- traversing, crossing a gap that is so loss. Imagery becomes a form of year old child in 1963, and so his large, so enormous, so immeasurably compensation as well as a place to memories of that country are unexamined that its potency increases. inhabit, a site of revisitation with all constituted almost entirely through the There is always a space "between" in the attendant associations of a spiritual images conjured by his parents and Rey's work, even in the way the pilgrimage invoked by such a term. other members of an exile community traditional sources combine with his Alberto - Agramonte, Cuba Nena - Agramonte, Cuba 1998 - 1999. 1998 - 1999 Oil on Plaster Oil on Plaster 15.5 x 12 inches. 15.5 x 12 inches. Rey is aware of these contradictions: can relate to through aesthetic means, position as one of appropriation and the title, Appropriated Memories, by the cultural forces that work through transformation. The modes of western which he refers to the large, black and him and on him are a poignant part of tradition have been absorbed and white painted landscapes on plaster the visual effect. If personal continuity altered to reflect and embody a new make this clear. As he himself has depends upon such elaborate illusions, community identity within Mexican stated, the very fact that they are in then what does it produce apart from a society. It's not surprising then that this black and white is to emphasize their tempered sense of loss? The answer style would appeal to Rey, who has unreality, their distance from any belie1 seems to be the motivation towards adapted it for his own use in his in the landscapes they depict. They are art, towards the creation of images that Retablos as well as in his portraits. images of images, made more remote at least express the difficulties of these through the toned down visual quality, dilemmas within personal and collective The Portraits are highly contemporary the subdued mood in which they are experience. images, moving in their immediacy as rendered. But they also acquire a well as in their evident echoing of magnetic intensity in their The Cuban Portraits, by their intimate historical models and traditions. The monochrome depth, luring the eye into scale and immediate humanity, suggest faces that look out at us from this their spaces as if into a land of Shades, another use of tradition and series are living faces, of our time in some lost geography towards which the appropriation.