Art in Cuba is like a machine that has continued to function after the engine stopped. Sandra Ramos belongs to the artists' promotion that I call “the weeds”, for her ability to proliferate in the tragic situation of the country. Her work has preserved the movement of the new Cuban art after the generalized diaspora of the 90s. Cuba does not produce food to feed its population, but - for better or for worse - it continues to produce superstructure.
Ramos and her colleagues are the artists of the post utopia and the crisis. A few years ago, I saw in Caracas a graffiti that said: "the dream was castrated." Now Ramos shows us The island that dreamed of being a continent, surrounded by famous dreamers of Cuban history and culture. In works like these, young people express the moment of awakening, when images of sleep and waking are mixed. They react to the collapse of a utopian project, but they are at the same time part of it in the complexity of a simultaneous, ironic and loving vision, since our home is the rubble of the city and utopia. Artists insistently deconstruct representations of power, sledgehammering the undamaged remnants of the past: representation and power. But they also integrate other representations. The triptych The new ideology makes the game of overlapping and intersecting transparent. Derrida said that self-deconstruction is the very process of deconstruction. In The Island That Dreamed ... Sandra Ramos is the sleeping island.
The artists of the post utopia have maintained the visual arts as a site for social discussion in a country where these sites do not exist neither in the mass media, or in assemblies or classrooms. It has perhaps been a unique case in which arts replaced the media without leaving itself, exercising resistance to authoritarianism and imposing a civil discourse.
Ramos leading in this as part of the feminine boom in “the weeds” and the appearance of a social feminism. She is one of the artists who project her biography, her intimate feelings and her own body towards the discussion of social, political and cultural problems. One of the most frequent tropes is the artist's self-portrait embodying the island or the flag, emotionally identifying her personal situation with that which the country suffers.
This exhibition, in the Nina Menocal gallery, titled Island Creatures, focuses on the Cuban diaspora, “an achievement of the revolution” increased in recent times. It has its antecedent in the installation of painted suitcases that was one of the works of greatest impact in the last Havana Biennial. The exodus, and in particular the tragedy of the rafters, has become an obsessive theme for artists. The Malecon boardwalk itself as that urbanistic personification of the border as a space for the social use of Havana residents - has become a recurring symbol, as we see in Ramos' pieces, and has given the synthesis image of the exodus.
Ramos is the only one that addresses the issue on its different sides. Not long-ago ago Kurt Hollander warned that the theme of the raft could be a fad and that, by focusing exclusively on the trip, not to mention life sooner or later, the works do not provide an in-depth critique. This exhibition, on the contrary, assumes the diaspora as a cultural social problem, feeling its diverse implications. She does so from a personal testimony that provides emotion to the analytical symbolization of the works. Titles like There Could Be Nothing Beyond Water, The Fear of Being Away from Home, Loneliness, or The Dream City, speak of fears, hopes, and experiences surrounding the widespread desire to leave, summarized in an overwhelming engraving of the island of Cuba like a huge raft that is paddled. Ramos has also presented the drama of the Guantánamo Base, in a work titled Fenced by the Waters.
Her painting is based on a relatively primitive language, with elements of comics and caricature, less robust than in her engravings. The works are baroque, with a proliferation of elements, details and subjects. They have an eclectic and fragmentary inclusivism typical of a certain post-modern taste. Beyond the question of the exodus, they constitute true symbolic altarpieces of current Cuba; in a sense they remind us of Bosco, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. But a more emotional shudder prevails in a Frida Kahlo way, due to the intimate, participative subjectivity of her vision. Paraphrasing Martí: they are cuts from the guts of any Cuban.