Luis Cruz Azaceta

Porque tuve que marcharme, todos pueden comprender;

Yo pensé que en cualquier momento a tu suelo iba a volver.

Celia Cruz

Exile is one of the major events that can affect anyone’s life. It is a forced condition that provokes anxiety, isolation, and a permanent sense of displacement to those who go through it. When Luis Cruz Azaceta arrived in New York he was18 years old and was alone.  Fifty years after that date he still longs for his country, clearly visible in Exile 50, a symbolic memento of all these years that passed since then. In this piece we see Azaceta pulling the map of Cuba made out of cotton. This is his way of dealing with an emotional wound that will never heal, with that sense of dislodgment that wouldn’t go away no matter how long he has live in another country.  The series Swimming to Cuba is a result of this feeling. According to Azaceta, it is the ‘mental trip’ that exiled people make at some point in their life, coming back to their country, at least imaginarily since many cannot do it physically. This longing becomes a persistent dream, and for Azaceta the easiest is to paint it, becoming a reality at least in an image. We see him swimming against the current towards an impossible objective: Havana, his city. Dreamlike imagery is also used in Cubanicarus, a sort of Cuban Icarus, trying to reach the country flying. This agony is palpable throughout all his works about Cuba, like an odd feeling of being incomplete and temporarily somewhere.

This is not the first time that he has represented migration and its effects in his work. In 1967 he made his first piece of balseros (rafters), being one of the first artists that portrayed this thematic. Up to this day, he has continued painting balseros, like in Tub: Hell Act, where we can see in a graphic and dreadful way this type of voyage, one of the most traumatic migrating methods. No wonder Azaceta titles the piece Tub: Hell Act, because that’s what it is if we take into account the stories of those who had survived it, similar to a passage from Dante’s inferno, a hopeless situation, and total abandonment to fate.

Azaceta looks at exile as a sequence: the initial phase of wanting to leave the country and then the longing to go back. Both processes are extremely painful, difficult, and traumatic: leaving is complicated, and not being able to return is equally throbbing for many.

Although exile is not the only subject that Azaceta has represented it has become one of the main ones in his latest work. His exiled condition has influenced the way he looks at society and how he perceives it, becoming a filter for his art. This exhibition brings up good examples of it, composed of two major themes that can be defined as Cuba and New Orleans, both addressed from a social point of view. Both places have shaped his identity and illustrated his journey: where is coming from and where he is at right now.

Since 1992 Azaceta lives and works in New Orleans, a city that has suffered in the past four years two major catastrophes. The first one was Katrina, a hurricane that devastated the place. This situation reverted to a social crisis, a distressed city overwhelmed by destruction and death.  Katrina changed the face of New Orleans and the perception people had of this city. Azaceta’s family felt a similar sense of displacement to what he did many years ago when they had to be evacuated from the city for a while. These circumstances were recognized by him and stirred back some memories, and Evacuation Highway came out of this process.  He also produced a series of bold works such as Katrina Boat, Bowl, Flood, and At the Bottom of the pots. While Bowl and Flood represent the catastrophe like a general state of affairs At the Bottom of the pots is putting a face to the tragedy. In the last one, Azaceta used actual photographs of people who lost everything. The human tragedy contained in these images is overwhelming, portraying a collapsing city, not only architecturally and in urban terms but also at a social level.

There is a piece that stands outs, Katrina Boat, like a silent reminder of horrifying images of floating boats, sometimes with people, others empty. The boat becomes a symbol of rescue and at the same time of loss, its eerie presence is evoking once more the duality of salvation-death, which was back them an almost equal possibility.

This year New Orleans was affected again, this time by the oil spills, changing the lives of many people in the area, mostly fishermen. Many of them jumped to their death when confronted by the reality of not being able to fish for an undetermined period. The series of Jumpers was born as an homage to them.  Azaceta also did other pieces related to this situation but with humorous and ironic comments. One of them is Spill #3, where he included a BP (British Petroleum) functionary dressed in a suit and a helmet in his head, criticizing their apparent interest in solving the problem, how just for showing off the company invested millions in its public image instead of using those resources in speeding the cleaning process. He also criticized the government's slow reaction with Spill: where is Superman when you need it?

There are symbols that the artist uses consistently throughout his work, at least in the last decade. Among those, we can mention the labyrinths and the tubs. Labyrinths are associated with searching, with a sense of looking for an exit to a problem, with being lost, and a lack of direction. Azaceta is using them as graphic representations of difficult situations, like Swimming to Havana, which is actually impossible. On the other hand, tubs function as a way of contentment, physically and visually allowing him to delimitate a space. It shows situations that are restrained to a determined geographical space and population, such as Cuba and New Orleans.

Although Azaceta portrays himself very often in his works he doesn’t consider it autobiographical in the strict sense. These are situations that undoubtedly have affected him at a personal level but not exclusively. He wants to present it from a personal point of view and refer to all the people whose lives had been touch by it.

Formally Azaceta has come to a middle ground between his early expressionistic paintings and the later almost abstract pieces like his Museums Series, by using the iconic brilliant colors of his early works and the composition structure of later ones. Azaceta's work is not a complacent type of art; it is visceral, aggressive, and even intrusive. It is a direct social critique and is meant to disrupt, it is a call of attention to all these situations he wants to address and wants people to be aware of. It is his way of rebelling and protesting against social disparity.