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When Mabel Poblet was barely a child and walked through the streets of her native Cienfuegos, she dreamed about being a ballerina, but she lacked the necessary physical aptitudes: her mother, an architect, and her father, a renowned children\u2019s theater company director, encouraged her to find herself. She started weighing her options in a school in the locality which did not give courses on engraving, the specialty she was interested in. That\u2019s why she arrived in Havana when she was just 16 years old and was able to enroll in San Alejandro, the prestigious arts academy from which she graduated in 2007. Definitively in the capital, Mabel discovered her \u201cway of communicating\u201d and her \u201clife\u2019s passion\u201d: visual arts.<\/p>\n
Considered one of the most outstanding emerging artists in the Cuban contemporary context, she forms part of the 2000 generation with an aesthetics that is her very own. Her themes have to do with the family, love, friendship, intercontinental relations: \u201ceverything that is part of life flows in my work,\u201d she says in an exclusive interview for OnCuba.<\/p>\n
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The year 2017 was one of great creative intensity for Mabel Poblet and for the materialization of dreams: she participated in the Cuba Pavilion in the Venice Biennial, \u201csomething I always yearned for and I feel greatly honored to have been chosen. I took to Venice an installation titled Escala de valores [Scale of Values]. It was truly impressive.\u201d<\/p>\n
With more than 50 personal and collective exhibitions in the United States, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, United Kingdom, Colombia, Ecuador and Spain, among other countries, Poblet recognizes that having studied in San Alejandro (2007) and having graduated from the Higher Institute of Art (2012), gave her the necessary tools to break away from the academy and open her own creative path. She affirms that the fact that the teachers are, at the same time, independent artists favors the dialogue and the expansion of views, while she recognizes her admiration for the work of Sandra Ramos and also recalls William P\u00e9rez, who involved her \u201cin kinetic art.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another of the fundamental and decisive influences for the young artist was exchanging experiences with Julio le Parc in his workshop in Paris: \u201cbeing close to the maestro gave my life a radical turn because getting to know a person with so much wisdom, so sweet, with so much love and with so much passion for his work, made me feel fortunate about my own work, about the career I chose and, above all, to realize how much can reach the entire world from a small workshop. That certainty is overwhelming.\u201d And she immediately recognizes that such an influence can be perceived in the series Patria (Homeland) in which she plays with movement, light, kinetics and, although they are static works, they can be catalogued as optic kinetic art.<\/p>\n
Although Mabel Poblet doesn\u2019t make a pure engraving, she does use it for work. It was the specialty that opened for her a field of expression for everything carried out until now: \u201cI was interested in engraving, not to make multiple works but rather to make unique works based on the multiplicity of one same element; that is why there is a series of small fragments in most of my works which make up a greater image. I believe that way of doing comes from my formation as an engraver.\u201d<\/p>\n
The self-referential was evident in the beginnings, especially in her first series titled Lugar de origen (Place of Origin) based on photos of her family and of spots in Cienfuegos. Subsequently, in Abacos (Abacuses) the creator focuses on memory and on how we create a host of information throughout life: \u201cI started getting to know more persons and stumbling upon social and political events that started affecting my daily life. All those experiences start settling and form part of creation; that is why I believe I have distanced myself a bit from self- referentiality, to speak of more global themes based on human interrelations.\u201d<\/p>\n
The human body has also been a support, a territory explored by Mabel based on the criterion that all human beings have common experiences, even if they have different lives: \u201cwe all see someone born, someone die; we move from a city, return to it and leave, we meet someone, we say goodbye, we meet again. In my work \u2013 after I left behind the self-referential \u2013 I started working with my own body, but to speak of other persons\u2019 experiences. One of those examples is the work Simplemente bella [Simply Beautiful] in which I collaborated with a group of women inmates in the prisons of Holgu\u00edn, in eastern Cuba. Until now Simplemente bella and Ana are two decisive pieces in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mabel Poblet\u2019s work is a constant, contemporary dialogue that is not indulgent at all with Cuban reality and also with matters of a planetary character, for example migrations. Her installations and sculptural objects are backed, first, on the idea and later on the technology. For example the work Marea alta (High Tide) \u2013 which forms part of the series Patria \u2013 \u201cis focused on Cuba\u2019s most recent history and how from abroad everything looks beautiful, but the journey crossing the sea can be very dangerous. That\u2019s why the piece is made based on many fragments, of mirrors that allude to what you can encounter on the way that is beyond your expectations,\u201d she affirms.<\/p>\n
Although she confesses that her dream work is \u201cachieving the nothing, the ephemeral, what you see and don\u2019t see,\u201d she still hasn\u2019t reached that point, but she is convinced that it is \u201cvery complicated to get to the simplicity of the nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the color red frequently appears in her work because, for her, \u201cit is a symbol of the forbidden and the wished for; it is in our blood \u2013 which is a vital liquid -, but at the same time it is found in the traffic, in the economy \u2013 which can allude to danger, to the stop signal; it is the color of love and of passion and therefore very temperamental.\u201d<\/p>\n
LOCALIZATION:
\nMabel Poblet Pujol (Cienfuegos, 1986)
\nStudio-Workshop Address: Calle 11, no. 256, entre J e I, El Vedado, Havana, Cuba
\nEmail: studiosmabelpoblet@gmail.com and mabelpoblet@cubarte.cult.cu<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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When Mabel Poblet was barely a child and walked through the streets of her native Cienfuegos, she dreamed about being a ballerina, but she lacked the necessary physical aptitudes: her mother, an architect, and her father, a renowned children\u2019s theater company director, encouraged her to find herself. She started weighing her options in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2445,"featured_media":111031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[33669],"class_list":["post-122237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n