Tuyomasyo presenta a Lázaro Saavedra en "El hacedor de puentes"
LÁZARO SAAVEDRA: CONCEPTUAL AND POPULAR.
"Popular, conceptual, but perhaps a little bit acelerao (nervous)".
By: Corina Matamoros
Saavedra is, in principle, a conceptual artist. The judgments of the work of art understood as an analytical proposition, and that of the "artistic condition" of art is but a conceptual condition, so defined by Joseph Kosuth, can apply to the work of this Cuban. But, in the first place, the Cuban conceptualism, inheritor of the one that in Latin America gave a sudden upturn —more like a knock down— to the original tendency, achieving to get on going some kind of expansive wave that revealed itself crucial for the art of the region. Because in our countries, conceptualism went out to the streets, it detached itself from the self referential topics and applied all that analytic artillery to the ideology area, from the socio-politic structures, from the hands of power, and of art as an institution, thus contaminating it with the particular circumstances of a continent with great pending issues in its social development. For instance the conceptualistic movement of Rio de Janeiro in the 60's, with the artist Helio Oiticica, or the Tucumán Arde group, from Argentina, as well as outstanding figures like Leon Ferrari, Arthur Barrio, Cildo Meireles, Roberto Jacoby, Waldemar Cordeiro and Luis Camnitzer, amongst others. Saavedra is, whether aware or not, beneficiary of the Latin-American reinvention of Conceptualism, of whom works like "Inserción en los circuitos ideológicos / Proyecto Coca-Cola" (Ideological circuit insertion / Coca-Cola project) by Cildo Meireles, are some of the best illustrations.
While this art was developed in some Latin-American capitals, Lázaro was, in the late 60's, a kid that used to draw with frenzy in the Havana neighborhood of Marianao. His mother had several occupations and his father was a percussionist in a cabaret in town.
Perhaps no one at home encouraged him to devote himself to art, but his neighbor Victorino, the neighborhood barber and an honest mason, unraveled in his pleasant chatter a totally different world. It was him who explained such unusual things like an author must sign his paintings, or that men today are the result of what other men did in the past, which is why they must leave a legacy for those who come afterwards. Victorino used to talk about these things.
When he entered the Art Elementary School in 23rd and C in 1976, as a teenager, was strongly attached to Adriano Buergo and Ciro Quintana, and later on to Ana Albertina Delgado and Ermy Taño. It was a humble originated group of kids, with no previous contact with painting, that were beginners of the art world and history from their belonging of the popular culture. Lázaro laughs with the memories of his fourteen-year-old self knowledge of the Pop art, and his believing that Picasso invented the abstraction (though he remembered Victorino telling him it had been a Russian.
His stay at San Alejandro between 1979 and 1983 doesn't seem to be of any importance to him, but a cloudy and messy period. When he entered the ISA (superior institute of art), in 1983, it took place a great crisis between what he was and what the Institute training induced him to be. His still poor artistic culture, his "chealdad" (Cuban slang for lack of good taste) —as he calls it—, and his way of painting when he entered, bumped against every unknown that came his way. Thus, he meets Conceptualism, one of the most prominent trends in the Cuban art as a whole, and especially for himself. From Flavio Garciandía, the professor who had the greatest influence on him with his culture and pedagogy, he obtains a great deal of information about the world standing art by then, especially from the visual point of view. Flavio, who was then producing key works that introduced themselves in the world of "kitsch" (for instance "El Lago de los Cisnes" of 1982 and the "Refranes" collection, from 1984), was really important for Lázaro, and also was a modeler of his sensitivity. Another great influence in the ISA was the Consuelo Castañeda's magistracy, who spread his fondness to the conceptual art among many other students, to become later the makers of powerful results in this tendency...
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Para más información sobre los trabajos de Lázaro Saabedra visite:http://www.galeriacubarte.cult.cu/g_expo.php?tema=74&lang=eng
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Lázaro Saavedra y David d'OMNI en SATSby EstadodeSats1,200 views
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