By Joaquin Taveras. Fine Arts Editor, Diplomat Magazine.
20th century art was the platform of surprising vanguard movements, not only in Europe but also in the new continent. The ethnic and historic imaginary of the Caribbean served as a motor for a pictorial transformation that instead of passing inadvertently, positioned itself comfortably while influencing consecrated movements and artists. The legendary African esthetic, the weight of slavery, the figures and symbology created during colonization and the magical-religious syncretism are but a few of the elements that characterize the Caribbean artistic expressions today.
In Paris, cradle of pictorial movements, the prestige of Guyanese intellectuals helped raise the voices of Latin-American surrealism in the Negro-culture paradigm; in that context initiate the default style of the contemporary arts of the Antilles: The Naïve (also translate as Primitivism), it searches to represent fables, myths, the quotidian reality in contradistinction to imagination and dreams, all through a fresh and colorful style that flirts more with the infantile than with what’s already established by academies. Haiti was its main exponent, enhanced mainly because of the patronage of great personalities such as Henri Christophe and Alexandre Petion.
It is worth noting four transcendent events that helped Caribbean art flourish: The surrealist exposition of Paris in 1947, the posterior creation of the Centre d’Art of Puerto Principe, Contributions by French painter Andre Breton and above all the connections to The New Negro Movement, one of the most renown movements in North American arts of the 20th Century, in which one of its pioneers was Puerto Rican Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
What differentiated Caribbean art from the rest? Essentially its search of primitivism as opposed to modernism, always with the interest of conserving and showing the beauty of such a mixed cultural identity, its complex story and the diverse socio-political realities that it endures: producing artworks with an unimaginable richness of concepts, forms, colors, textures… all in constant transformation.
Tardy but well deserved, the acknowledgement spacious modern art places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Saatchi Gallery in London or the Centre Pompidou in Paris give to Caribbean artists. Amongst them are: Cuban Wilfredo Lam, Dominican Paul Giudicelli, Haitian Antonio Joseph and Tobago Peter Doig.
Nowadays contemporariness of Caribbean art still explores diverse techniques and styles that go on par with the acceptance and development of multidisciplines. From Rene Mederos graffiti’s, Allora & Calzadilla’s installations, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz video, to Ana Mendieta’s performance and the creation of new galleries and spaces, Caribbean art is definitely in its prime.
