Chambers Gallery, 10/2010

Review by Miguel Barnet on the occasion of Choco´s exhibition Abanico de Posibilidades (A range of possibilities) in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, May 2004. 

"Choco, master of collography, is the most seasoned of Cuba´s figurative expressionists - his solid impastos and sensual figures placing him head and shoulders above his contemporaries. Like his painting, he is delicate and at the same time expansive, rich in chiaroscuro and seductive by nature. His seduction makes us savour his paintings, find support in wood and linoleum, in metal and vinyl. He takes us by the hand to a world captivating in its aromas of tropical fruits and arms and legs of the bodies which merge in their ethnicity to strengthen the island´s identity. In his art I see the essence of the Cuban, an essence which he rescues with his talent and sensibilities and raises to a universal category. 

His work contributes to our own understanding of ourselves as better human beings because with it we discover another path to the realm of the fantastic which we all aspire to reach - where art always leads us, this time at the hand of the great Choco."

There have been two crucial moments in Choco´s career. The first, when he was recognised as one of the leading figures of the ´epic-rural´ movement in painting which was so important in shaping the ¨70´s generation¨ of Cuban artists. The second moment was his exploration of ´collography´ in the 80s and early 90s, an achievement only matched in Cuba by the well-known engraver, Belkis Ayón. 

For Choco, orthodox limitations are rejected. Even when he seems closer to one genre or another, similar intentions can be seen in both; whatever his chosen medium, his skills are driven by over forty years´ artistic experience. 

DM: Choco, you come from a generation that emerged from anonymity and exclusion to enter -after the revolution of 1959?? - the world of artistic creativity. How did this happen? 

Ch: In the early 60s, the government launched an initiative for people to study arts in Havana. I passed all the tests and came to the capital. It was 1962, and I was only 12 years old. I started a professional course at the Escuela Nacional de Instructores de Arte (The National School for Art Instructors). There were classes in painting, engraving and handicrafts and I had the privilege of meeting some of the biggest artists of that time ? people like Alfredo Sosabravo, Antonia Eiriz, Núñez Booth, and Armando Posse, who opened my eyes to the world of creativity. I didn´t have the slightest idea what it meant to be a painter, let alone an artist! When I finished my studies, I couldn´t work as an arts instructor as I wasn´t old enough, I was lucky, however, because I was accepted by the, Escuela Nacional de Arte (National School of Arts). 

Antonia Eiriz had the biggest impact in my development at that time. After I finished at the National School of Arts, she continued giving me classes for some time. I also learned to appreciate Sosabravo who is a great teacher, and I have fond memories of Armando Posse, with whom I continued learning after I joined the Taller Experimental de Gráfica (Experimental Graphics Workshop). 

DM: Who gave you the nickname Choco? 

Ch: When I joined ENA (the National School of Arts) some colleagues started to compare me with Chocolatico Pérez, a boxer from Santiago de Cuba. That´s how it started. When you get a nickname, at the beginning you hate it. Everyone mocks your uneasiness. All my family was calling me Chocolate, Choco?? - my mother, my wife, my kids; so I had to accept it one way or the other. And that was it. 

DM:  When did you learn engraving techniques? 

Ch: Engraving was one of the courses taught at ENA when I was there, around 1965. Later, in 1975, I joined Taller de Gráfica in the Plaza de la Catedral in Old Havana, full of first-rate artists. In those days it was difficult to come by all the material needed so Cuban artists had to develop alternative forms of creating, such as engraving. 

In the 80s, I had the chance to go to the US and I learned a lot about this technique. When I returned to Cuba I put all that experience to good use, particularly in lithography. I must say that I have never adopted engraving simply as engraving per se. I think of it as painting and that´s how it´s reflected throughout my work. At the beginning, there was a time when I developed some engravings in black and white contrasts, improvising with shades of grey. However, I must confess that I was working from the perspective of working with colour. I also started working on metal and linoleum, due to lack of other materials. 

This shortage of materials lasted all through the 80s so I started developing collography. It is an innovative technique and mainly pictorial. At the beginning, when working on it, I felt like I was painting, doing wide brushstrokes and placing all the colours on the printing plate as if it was on canvas. It was a major discovery, an ideal alternative to painting. Afterwards, by the end of the 70s a more prosperous period followed, when I had the chance to start painting the Cuban landscape, the countryside and the campesinos (peasants). Then I created really colourful pieces. The figuration came out with the same strength, the same expressiveness, that I created with my engraving. Some people might see me as an engraver. In my mind, as an artist, I function as a painter. That was what I studied at ENA 

DM:  Have you had any preferred style during your career? 

Ch: I love all styles and I favour all trends. At a certain moment in my development, new figuration had a major impact and I have carried it with me ever since. I am attracted to abstract art and no one can figure it out. My work is figurative par excellence. However, an identification with the abstract bubbles in my spirit. I have deeply admired the work of Raúl Martínez and I feel it is quite close to my artistic conception, even though we face art differently. I have also studied the works of Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Picasso, whom I consider the greatest of masters. I encourage the young irreverent artists and I am proud of having taught some of them in the 1980s. The challenge for me is seeing all these generations, all those periods, all those revolutions in style, and keeping myself active, trying to create work that?? - even from more traditional positions?? - approaches the heights that these young artists envisage. 

DM:  What have been the essential subjects of your work through all these years? 

Ch: For the first 10 years, I dealt with the campesinos (peasants in the Cuban countryside). This subject attracted most of my generation of the 70s, each artist giving it his or her own personal, individual style. Most of us were of provincial or rural origins, and as a result of the radical change after 1959, we became involved in the social process. So, our work conveyed a vision of the country from an urban perspective, or the representation of our own experience of migrating to the city. 

DM:  Have you been interested in issues of race or identity? 

Ch: When I paint, I don´t think in terms of white, mulatto, black or Chinese. The person I portray has body, limbs, soul, heart, grey matter. I refer to the biological, universal man. The person I paint has no particular skin colour or profile. If you look closely, I show them with heterogeneous features, maybe African lips, Chinese eyes, pink or earth skin shades: it is a person that has its ascendancy all over the world. 

When you look at my human figures, if you look closer at their faces, you see an amalgamation of elements. From a face, let´s say, I can extract any object: vegetation, for instance, or landscape. I am comfortable, formally and conceptually, painting man as the centre of everything. 

There was a time when I eliminated all reference to man, in a series during the 70s that I called ¨The secret life of plants.¨ People would come up and ask ¨Why aren´t you including the campesinos any more?¨ I´d reply: ¨You´re right, the campesino is no longer there but his context is. Everything you could not see before because it was in the background of the campesino is now there, the sugarcane plantation, the citrus groves, everything.¨ I tried to get a close-up of plants, to underline all that shows life in them, just to establish a parallel with the human being. 

DM:  Now that you´re involved full time in painting, has your collography work diminished? 

Ch: Both collography and the mystery of engraving are so deep inside me that it is practically impossible for me to separate from it. Even when most of my work is painting, I am compelled to do some engraving. My body craves for it, and so do my canvasses? Why? Because with engraving I learned many things useful for painting. This feedback across both techniques makes it difficult to exclude engraving from my work. If I paint ten canvasses, it is because I have done at least five pieces in any engraving technique, even though I prefer collography. Also engraving pushes me to go on with my work, it has never disappointed me or let me down. 

DM:  Nowadays you have a following?? - people who track all your events and exhibitions. Is that a signal that your work has reached a comfortable peak of achievement? 

Ch: I am not aware of that limit and I believe I will be never be aware of it. Besides, it is not up to me to define it. One´s career lasts till death. I believe in what I do, and I think that in order to achieve a certain level or maturity, you have to work everyday, day after day. I am not worried about fame, but about how to find the ideal manner to express the context where I live, its atmosphere, its spirit, its illumination, the specific way of feeling and living of its people. 

DM:  How has your work been received outside Cuba? 

Ch: I have done several exhibitions in different parts of the world, in highly developed countries. Japan is the one I find most interesting. My work has been very welcome there. The Japanese are impressed with the fact that Cuban artists have supplemented the lack of resources with an enormous intellectual eagerness and creativity. Some people have used the term ¨poor art¨ to describe Cuban art, but it carries a contradiction in itself. You may work with poor, ephemeral materials, but if you put your life and your talent into it, it is not poor but wealthy art. It carries the experience, the body and the soul of the artist. In a talk I had at the Kyoto University, the professors confessed that, with the excessive use of material and technological resources, some of the creations of the young local artists appeared cold, ethereal and lacking sense. 

DM:  What´s your opinion of the Cuban critics and their comments about the generation of the 70s? 

Ch: I hardly ever pay attention to the critics. They´re never aware of what goes on in the inner world of an artist. The artist thinks of something and the critic adorns the whole thing because he has the gift to speak. However, both the artist and the critic are on opposite tracks of thought most of the time. Our creative process back in the 70s when we started was completely in tune with the revolutionary transformation happening in the country. The interesting thing is that this much-criticised generation is still around, doing a lot of deeply important things in and out of the country. When a generation is aware of what it does and continues to create and participate in the cultural process of its time, it is difficult for it to lose its way or go backwards. 

DM:  Some of your contemporaries and some that came after your time, mainly engravers, show a direct influence of your method and artistic style. What´s your view on that? 

Ch: I am actually quite happy that people follow the things I do. It means they have value. What I have achieved so far and what people now follow is the result of experimenting and studying. For example, for those planes of black in my collographic work, quite difficult to make, I started experimenting in different fabrics and also jute. At the beginning, it did not work out because of the texture and the thread combination, and the greying effects on cardboard. Then I tried sandpaper and carborundum, but it did not work either, and they were expensive. In the end, I tried with sand. You can imagine all the hard work, as I had to sift through a massive amount of sand from the sea and then let it dry under the sun so it would not affect the pieces. It was a long process but it worked out cheaper. I managed to achieve clean and tranquil shades of black and I was able to combine it with interesting textures, conceived with fine wooden plates. 

BY ESTRELLA DIAZ — Special for Granma International

IT’S not that the British have stopped drinking tea. No. It’s that during this October, at the Chambers Gallery in London, they can admire the one-man show of Chocolate, alias Eduardo Roca Salazar, one of the most outstanding and significant figures in Cuban contemporary visual arts.

This exhibition by Choco —his first one-man show in that country— is something of a “preview,” because in September 2008, a series of Cuban cultural events will take place in this capital, including music, film, ballet and visual arts exhibitions.

Michael Chambers, owner of the above-mentioned gallery, recently traveled to Havana and visited the Taller del Sol workshop, named after the street where it is located, and where Choco currently works. There, acting as curator, he chose about 50 works of art, most of which are larger than four square meters, and which are oil on cloth, colagraphy and mixed media. 

According to the artist, he is satisfied with his selection and believes that it is a “very interesting exhibition for British eyes.” All of the pieces were made during the last three years, after his one-man show in the National Museum of Fine Arts (2004), titled Abanico de posibilidades (Range of Possibilities), an important moment in his creative activities, a profound look back, given the degree of maturity and the solidness of his creations.

From then to date, Choco’s body of work has expanded and experienced growth; that is perhaps due to the fact that his workshop – thanks to efforts by the City Historian’s Office – has increased not just physically, but also “in themes.”

“I believe that I am at an excellent moment to continue creating the work that my people and my country deserve,” Choco commented. He added, “I don’t know if in the immediate future I will experience a change of theme: those are things that one never knows; they are aspects that you cannot predict, but the result comes out of a profound analysis of who we are and how far we have come as a people, as a nation.”

Throughout this year, Choco, a tireless worker and a laboriously systematic artist, has participated in several collective exhibitions, and one of them, because of its humane significance, holds special importance: “The one dedicated to the Cuban five, who are unjustly imprisoned in the United States.”

He has also illustrated several books and a collection of African short stories.

“That work expands your thinking and enriches your work,” he affirmed, noting that before the year is over, he plans to travel to his native province of Santiago de Cuba in the east to participate in an exhibition of religious-themed work.

“I think the mystical subject is important, because it nourishes us as human beings and makes us better,” he concluded.

www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/octubre/vier5/40choco-i.html