Camilo Villalvilla Soto stood beside his painting “Extrañas Aves Migratoria,” a piece of many meanings.
For one thing, as he said, “Los pajaros estan en la forma de Cuba” – the red birds are in the shape of his country.
The birds are all eating and calm, Villalvilla said, and then in a second – he clapped his hands forcefully – they take off, and all disappear.
“Everything is white. That’s the idea,” the artist said.
It’s a reflection on how everything dies, and can disappear quickly, he continued – before adding another layer.
“In Cuba this is not a problem for us, because immigration is so large that (practically) all of the young people” leave for the United States and other places, Villalvilla said, so the birds could be seen as “los jóvenes.”
Villalvilla, who is from Cienfuegos, on Cuba’s southern coast, pointed out where his city might be on his map. He was far from home, at the Foster Gallery of Noble and Greenough School, which has been exhibiting his work and that of a second Cuban artist, Luis Alberto PérezCopperi, in recent weeks. The show, “Private Language / Lenguaje Privado,” closes Friday. The gallery is open for free from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Its director, Amanda Wastrom, said that Villalvilla’s paintings have universal themes, and that you can imagine in your head what’s going on in them.
“But once you hear Camilo talk about them, it gives them a whole other set of meanings,” she said. “They’re really fertile drawings. There’s a lot of territory explored in these.”
The exhibit is a smaller version of the one Wastrom saw in June at the Cuban Art Space of the Center for Cuban Studies in New York. The center – which made Nobles’ show possible – is dedicated to providing information about contemporary Cuba and to helping to normalize relations between Cuba and the U.S.
There is still a ways to go on that front. While Villalvilla appeared for the opening reception and visited with students in residence at Nobles, Copperi was not able to come to the exhibit because of visa problems. “That situation kind of encapsulates what we’re talking about – the fact that it’s so difficult for an artist to get here to visit,” Wastrom said.
Both artists address the legacies of their country’s politics. Copperi’s monochromatic drawings on rough brown paper focus on Cienfuegos, but “his figures explore psychological, political and spiritual territories with fearless objectivity,” according to the gallery.
Villalvilla said his pieces in the exhibit are very recent, with most of them done in 2010.
“Cuba is not only mysterious for you. It is also very mysterious for us,” he said.
Specifically, he is interested in Cuba’s future. “In Cuba we are changing many things, but I think what is important is the form of the changes,” he said in Spanish, before switching to English: “We are in worried in Cuba about the way in which we do the change in the country.”
That is because Fidel Castro is very sick, and who knows what will happen after he is gone, Villalvilla said, but he also thinks it is necessary to change things now.
The famous Cuban musician Silvio Rodríguez thought that “the word revolution, we need to take off the R, and do some evolutions. And I think, like him, that we must evolve things in the revolution,” Villalvilla said. “That is one of the themes that most interest me in my work.”
In Soviet Russia, “the change was very drastic” from Communism to a more radical kind of capitalism in the 1990s, while Cuba has many things that are good and bad, he added.
The Cuban government announced last month that it would lay off more than half a million public workers, part of a still-developing shift toward an economy that includes a substantially bigger private sector. Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl Castro, has made some reforms since becoming president in 2008.
The Cuban Revolution and Communism echo in Villalvilla’s playful work, such as in his painting of a polar bear dreaming of Karl Marx – whose eyes are closed, and who in turn is dreaming of the polar bear – or “El sacerdote,” an image of Che Guevara as an astronaut.
In 1980 the first and only Cuban went into space, and after that all the kids thought they would be astronauts, said Nobles student Anthony Laurencio-Twymer, who translated at times during the interview along with a classmate.
In Cuba, children say that they do something like Che, Villalvilla said. “The painting speaks of this – of how we all had this dream.”
And of what he wanted the country to be, but it did not happen, translated Nobles student Adriana Ureña.
“Behind every picture is a story,” Villalvilla said.
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