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Manuel López Oliva: Cuba, Myth and Masquerade

by Lillian Guerra, Ph.D.

“My painting is filled with words, only they are all silent words,” says the Cuban artist Manuel López Oliva, rising from a stool in his Havana studio and punctuating his remarks with deliberate, subtle movements of the hands. “It is not a traditional form of painting, but one that has an open signification, and the texts it conveys or cites generate their own visual legend, their own iconography or image, that is, the text acquires its own expressive autonomy within the work, an autonomy that is also poetic.”*

Standing before any image in this collection of López Oliva’s work, it is easy to see what he means. Woven of vibrant, highly decorated strands of color that enlace, delineate and extend from the iconic faces and bodies of figures that stand at their center, these deeply textured paintings reveal themselves in terms that are both strange and familiar, mysterious yet decipherable. Paradoxical symbols encode a diversity of meaning that lies just below the surface of each canvas, both within and beyond easy grasp. The viewer is drawn to a wealth of emotions and multiple narratives embedded in an almost obsessive layering of paint. Pain, remorse, hubris, desire, wonder, delight, greed and even anger emerge from their shapes. One feels as much called to look into the theatrical, semi-tropical landscapes of the world that López Oliva creates as at them. Peopled by taut, often statue-like characters, the stages and scenery that form the lush background for these visual narratives are surprisingly fluid, set in motion by tiny mechanical brushstrokes that embellish borders, eyes, and bodies, imparting life through swirling, cascading hues.

By contrast, the protagonists of López Oliva’s painted dramas appear caught in a web of their own design. Always ornate, flexible and occasionally feathered, a series of string-like tentacles emerge from heads and sides, trapping the figures in place while also endowing them with a spirit of intense longing. A constant feature of López Oliva’s works since 1993, these “tentacle-strings” embody metaphors of a very human tendency to strive, to search, and to find an increasingly elusive, ever-more ephemeral sense of truth.

Born, raised and educated in Cuba, a country whose history has been defined by precisely this tendency for the last two-hundred years, López Oliva sees his art as telling the story of not just Cuba, but of many societies with related histories of struggle: “I try to make my work span all time frames, to defy all historical constraints. Even the very frontal composition that I use—rigid, at times quite rigid—to create my subjects evokes the rigidity of patriarchal societies, societies where democracy has never really existed, societies that are themselves unyielding, and for that reason, they are the ones which stagnate. This is why my figures are petrified, that is, stone-like. The forces that compose them have been hardened, stiffened.”

Their context, however, depicts urgency, turbulence. Some of López Oliva’s paintings draw on the myths and symbols of classical times, such as the fatricidal battles of “Antigone” (1996), the deadly, self-deceiving arrogance of “Ajax” (1999) and the symbolic bundle of sticks used by Roman emperors to denote their unquestionable right to rule in “The Mask and the Fasces” (2002). Others like “Faust” (2000) and “Robert Le Diable” (2005) reference European operas of temptation and possession by an evil whose origin remains indeterminate, coming as much from within as from without, a figment of the imagination as well as a palpable companion of everyday existence. Yet, there is no denying how very Cuban these works are. While the images and themes that make them so may at times seem invisible to foreign eyes, they are luminous and haunting to the gaze of viewers more immersed in this island’s history and more consciously affected by its ingrained myths of national redemption.

López Oliva’s work of the last fifteen years began to reflect the dramatic changes that overtook Cuba as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the collapse of the socialist trading bloc on which Cuba’s economy, culture and nationalist state had come to depend. “Like thousands of people, almost all of my generation of artists, writers, and those who were not writers but scientists, I passed through a romantic phase of identification, of adhesion. And later, in the 1990s, I began to understand the great changes in the life of Cubans and consequently, in my perception of life in Cuba, of Cuban culture and of the whole world, and I suddenly began to return to the first phase of my artistic development—all without noticing, like a snake that turns and bites its tail. I began to make images that found their inspiration in poster art, but in a fantastic style of poster art in which texts, when they appeared, only serve to highlight a particular, instinctive meaning which might or might not be there.”

Building on the theme of a carnival, eternal masquerade, López Oliva’s most recent works often entice the viewer into a liminal plane or stage alongside the mask-faced figures themselves. One of the most striking examples in this regard is “Carnival” (2001). Lushly configured in vibrant, oceanic shades of blue, “Carnival” features a tall, female figure as principal protagonist. Possessed of medusa-like hair whose tentacles reach upward but unlike those of other paintings, go nowhere, the feminine woman’s body is stamped with the image of a key, not by way of a costume, but more like a tattoo. The key enraptures us with an inviting semiology, eliciting paradoxical sensations of liberation as well as oppression. The key might open or close the ancient walls of the city of Havana in the colonial era, release or seal the chastity belt of a married woman in Roman times. “The key is also found on the national shield of Cuba, appearing at top as if it were the island itself,” López remarks with an impish smile. “Cuba was historically called the key of the Antilles, the key to the Gulf. Cuba can also be carnival. In some way, life in Cuba has become something of a carnival in which the world was—and still is—turned upside-down, its meanings inverted, its roles reversed. The Revolution is in many ways, a grand carnival, macabre at times, but a carnival.”

Liberty and libertinage combine and cavort uneasily behind the mask-face of López Oliva’s carnival queen. Unsure whether to embrace the total freedom and radical ecstasy that release from the social order and society’s norms offer us, we stand back, like figures in the painting, left to ponder the alternative freedom forged not on the street, but through constituted systems of power that limit, define, defend and thereby, contradict its basic tenets. One wonders whether anyone can ever be truly free of the tentacle-strings that bind us to the historical patterns of collective duplicity and personal self-deception depicted in López Oliva’s paintings.

Sharing these thoughts with the artist, I return to the role of texts and suggest that “Monologue” (2005) may epitomize the idea of self-righteous conviction leading to alienated, isolating discourse. The artist shakes his head vigorously. “Monologue is text. Here there is a loud cry, a cry that is also a speech, that is, people are making a speech about what cannot be said. It is as if a person were to throw himself into the middle of the street in order to say all that he feels, but he can’t say it and so, since he can’t say it, all that he wants to say is transformed into a thicket of phrases, a forest of images, a kind of strange, vegetal mass of vines that projects itself upward, toward space. And as a result, the words hide themselves, they disguise themselves, and the text also takes on a mask.”

There is nothing alienated or isolating about López Oliva’s art. These open, intimate and inviting images appear to hide little or nothing, leaving the viewer with no alternative but to reciprocate the act. Yet, there is an unfinished quality to the narratives that these works provoke and illustrate. The stories they tell are as much about Cuba as they are about ourselves, whoever we may be.

* All direct quotes extracted and translated from the author’s taped interview with Manuel López Oliva, August 15, 2005, Havana, Cuba.
(From the catalogue of exhibition “Manuel López Oliva: Cuba, Myth & Masquerade” (2006).John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art., New Haven, C, EE.UU)