{"id":1368,"date":"2012-09-30T18:37:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-30T18:37:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-09-10T23:30:03","modified_gmt":"2013-09-10T23:30:03","slug":"ruben-alpizar-architect-parody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/lights-shadows\/ruben-alpizar-architect-parody\/","title":{"rendered":"Rub\u00e9n Alp\u00edzar: an Architect of Parody?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Photos: Courtesy of the artist<\/strong><\/p>\n

It may be said that certain focal points of everyday life \u2014 the ones that some refer to as prosaic \u2014 are a constant in the work of painter Rub\u00e9n Alp\u00edzar (Santiago de Cuba, 1965), an artist who has successfully invigorated a particular esthetic, in which humor, almost bordering on irony, invites us to reflection.<\/p>\n

Self-representation, too, is a way he has found to communicate with the viewer: his work is loaded with messages, suggestions and even light-hearted spaces that harmoniously blend together into a relationship of dialogue with the beholder.<\/p>\n

In each of his designs, we can perceive a wink at the profession, thanks to his polished technique, achieved through academic training: four years\u2019 basic and four years\u2019 mid-level studies at the Jos\u00e9 Joaquin Tejada provincial school of visual arts in Santiago de Cuba; subsequently, from 1984 to 1989, he was enrolled at Havana\u2019s ISA, the Instituto Superior de Arte.<\/p>\n

That formal training at different levels has allowed him to maintain, support and bear out an extremely personal pictorial discourse that, with the passage of time, has become drawn together in series. The most recent are: Callabos de Troya (Trojan Horses), El sabor de las l\u00e1grimas (The Taste of Tears) and \u00cdcaro (Icarus). And as he delights in what is known as the \u201cpainter\u2019s trade,\u201d over and over again Alp\u00edzar takes on \u201clife itself\u201d as his greatest theme: \u201cto run into a story, a joke, an anecdote, something that people read to you, a reality, every day: that is basic. Love, too, is essential, and of course, so are the problems that we have to face every day,\u201d he commented to OnCuba.<\/p>\n

His paintings seem to be supported by religious iconography \u2014 which he included from early on \u2014 but his work is not. Religion is just a pretext for addressing earthly, universal and human themes, while his arguments are transmitted through a fine prism with nuances of the absurd and even sarcasm.<\/p>\n

The media he uses are totally interwoven with his designs, to the extent that the painting almost becomes a sculpture; a marked interest in breaking with planimetrics can be seen, including when he uses lavish textures. Perhaps that play with volume contains an incitation to observe the painting with something of a lucid, interactive approach: \u201cit is not a question of touching the painting, but of making people inclined to touch it, to look at it from behind, from ahead or from one side,\u201d he emphasizes.<\/p>\n

Alp\u00edzar is a painter who uses almost all colors, but at the same time, his tones are filtered using the \u201cvelatura\u201d technique, which give a sensation of aging: the most prominent colors on his palette are opaque greens, grays, siennas and pastel blues.<\/p>\n

When experiencing his work, you are overcome by a feeling of looking at a stage production, because his work is full of theatricality: each painting narrates a story from beginning to end with climactic moments, all of it part of a painstaking process of creation: \u201cI am very meticulous, very fussy. First I organize my ideas \u2014 I put together a type of story \u2014 and describe how each element how will be placed and what I want to say, and I even draw up the composition: this goes here, that element goes in that corner, and that one goes on the other side. I also make note of the reference: this character is taken from such-and-such a painting. That is how I shape the general idea of the piece.<\/p>\n

Alp\u00edzar highlights the relationship between the person and time, because he knows that every human beings inhabits a certain period of time \u2014 the one that he strives to capture on every canvas. He is also a real architect of parody, which no doubt is useful to him for reflecting on specific themes of Cuba today with a perspective that is sharp and questioning, but above all transparent and authentically sincere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photos: Courtesy of the artist<\/strong><\/p>\n

It may be said that certain focal points of everyday life — the ones that some refer to as prosaic — are a constant in the work of painter Rubén Alpízar (Santiago de Cuba, 1965), an artist who has successfully invigorated a particular esthetic, in which humor, almost bordering on irony, invites us to reflection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":3619,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[33568],"class_list":["post-1368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lights-shadows"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRub\u00e9n Alp\u00edzar: an Architect of Parody? | OnCubaNews English<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/lights-shadows\/ruben-alpizar-architect-parody\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rub\u00e9n Alp\u00edzar: an Architect of Parody? 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