Magazine 32 (EN), Stories (EN)

Enrique Alfonso

The Epiphanies of Enrique Alfonso

By Maybel Martínez

In 1939, Fernando Ortiz first characterized Cuban culture as an ajiaco. The syntagma constitutes one of the metaphors positioned as defining to describe and characterize, over the years, the socio-cultural scenario of the Island. This concept, which we have mimetically repeated since we were children, assumes the constant incorporation of new elements, in a process of enrichment and in correlation with the diversity and plurality of sources. But culture always contains a didactic nature that needs to be updated in order to sustain itself, in this process cultural zones that were essential for our ajiaco are made invisible.

In these cultural occlusions, peasant scenarios, myths and legends –so studied by Samuel Feijoo-, music and other cultural forms tend to be made invisible or turned into historical souvenirs. That marvelous real that once could define the Cuban, the daily life and the imaginary begins to languish, as the subjects do not possess an interaction or knowledge with those border cultural zones. It is in these identity cracks where Enrique Alfonso’s artistic production is nourished.

His work could roughly be seen under the label “costumbrista”, which would only encapsulate it. Behind each piece there is an underlying allegory that preserves a vital attachment to the everyday built through an extensive score of intertwining stories. The narrative will of this author, places us before timeless scenes in which the individual and his relationships, his day to day, are represented from the intimate. Many of his productions describe more than one event, using the resource of painting within painting, elements added as support for the central theme and that close the narratological cycle of the work. In the mixture of symbolic elements and their hybridization with the corporeality of the characters lies something more than simple operations of recognition, addition or inclusion. His works are based on a feedback character that presupposes spaces of understanding and rejection. A game of glances between the interior and exterior of what is represented from the playful character of the pieces. The situations exhibited are marked by a kind of magic, whose ironic and burlesque humor is a resource to talk to us about human nature and its many nuances. 

A common Cuban who is surprised by scenes taken out of context, with a surrealist breath that integrates cultured and popular areas. Enrique’s characters seem to be taken from fable illustrations. His eyes are gigantic eyeballs reminiscent of lowbrow style and Margaret Keane. Looks that overflow with tenderness and at the same time are disturbing, defying the golden ratio. Looks that can be classified as mysterious or melancholic, full of enigmatic mysticism. The well-known phrase that defines the eyes as the mirror of the soul, in Enrique’s works has a lot of truth.

His gaze is undisciplined and resists accepting reality as it is, appealing to a way of thinking and inhabiting the world that represents the social kaleidoscope that we are. The irony makes sense when dismantling the false scaffolding that is concealed behind an apparently naive and tender disguise. There is in his works a Boterian breath in the treatment of volumes and spaces by transforming the known world into another, where improbable things happen. 

His works are not only to be observed by the spectator, they at the same time observe and question us. His visual constructions do not imply a denial, ignorance or contempt for the real but a conscious incorporation of where the author places himself as a subject, a detachment towards his own. A process of dismissal which underlies a mechanism of resistance to the prevailing aesthetic indoctrination. An act of rethinking and reconstructing the homogeneity imposed in certain areas of the praxis to expand the narrative vision of the work and its links with the viewer. The image/look relationship as a neuralgic point between the receiver and the cultural, symbolic, social codes that are handled, from the estrangement and playfulness to establish the mechanisms of interpretation and deconstruction of what is observed. Following the maxim that in many cases we use in our colloquial dialogues, it is necessary to know how to look and look well.

Enrique Alfonso
Enrique Alfonso
Enrique Alfonso
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