Nothing of Death, Much of Memory
By Ricardo Alberto Pérez
The absence of flesh and muscle does not always symbolize the proximity or presence of death; specifically, the skulls reveal the structures of our head, imagining all the subjective material that inhabits it to the rhythm of existence is already a differentiated adventure that escapes any limit or control. To imagine skulls outside that traditional meaning with which most people relate them is to open a vigorous and disturbing path within the field of interpretation of the spectators; the work of Julio César Peña Peralta (Holguín, 1969), a shrewd creator who overflows irony and polysemy through his pieces, is immersed in that adventure.
With a work in which the constant accumulation of contents plays a crucial role, Julio César Peña has the virtue of discovering and assuming engraving as his main expressive tool among the diverse pictorial languages, and in this way adding a disturbing and singular poetics to the already rich and varied panorama of contemporary Cuban engraving, prestigious for several decades for the talent of figures such as Rafael Zarza, Ángel Ramírez, Belkis Ayón, Sandra Ramos, and Ibrahim Miranda, among many others.
As some specialize in expressing the magnitude of the natural landscape in all its splendor, we are before a creative process that goes into each of the most unsuspected corners of the urban landscape, an authentic radiography of a city that in fact, by its essence is quite extravagant, and becomes more extravagant after the transit of its ultra picturesque characters, who symbolize survival within an insularity that ends up being tacitly cruel. Without discriminating that his gaze is anthropological, he embraces the diverse and represents it with a sarcasm that is sustained on the beams of the diaphanous humor. In this way, I dare to affirm that the apparent folkloristic traits he appropriates serve to root his relationship with the popular, an element he avidly nourishes himself with.
Thus he leaves us the spirit of a chronicle in constant construction, he makes us accomplices of his retracing, inserting us in those attractive and necessary connections that manages to establish the culture between the diverse creative expressions; for that reason there are moments in which I return to these engravings and some of the beings that sprout from them, as provocations make me relive the features of those beings created by Virgilio Piñera, capable of making our skin crawl and make us understand better the impulses that are unleashed in this island. When perceiving the different social groups illustrated by Julito Peña, the real scope of his poetics is understood, from this transgressive procession of the faces, a surprising lucidity is reached, which offers abundant fuel to analyze the roughest and most fickle events.
In a gesture of audacity, the skull is transcended to the point of representing the skeleton from a moving amplitude, capable of unfolding in narrative sequences of solid conceptual posture and unusual lyricism, achieved from the reverse of what commonly makes up the metaphor. These are moments in which our mind must let itself be carried away by the irreverence of this gaze and thus discover a new way of perceiving the environment.
Thus the unusual always represents a greater challenge, an adventure surrounded by the mystery of the unknown, the engraver assumes this risk in a very radical way, because when the guillotine falls, there will be no turning back, it is an irrevocable decision that is stamped, and definitely constitutes the work. In this way he does not cease to summon us from the lean jetas, in pure defiance he does not renounce caps, eyeglasses and earrings; and thus he makes use once again of the power that these contradictions generate within the visual plane that he constructs.
Through his prints Julio César Peña does not miss the opportunity to show us an updated Havana, stapled in a series of contradictions that are still painful truths, those symptoms of the city that suffers and at the same time continues to show charms within these drastic transformations that come upon it.
The way he fantasizes about the universe of his skulls, the motifs and variations that he has created, is very striking. The motifs and variations he uses support an authentic creative vein, which takes from many parts and spreads them in a new context; these imageries, sometimes, are very close to the character of the underground and refers us to the rich traditions of graffiti and tattooing; one responsible for inscribing in the collective space that indispensable torrent of popular art, and the other of a memory that remains as a testimony in the private space (human skin).
Recognized with several awards, inside and outside Cuba, he not only limits himself to expressing his concerns through engraving, but also frequently enters the world of painting where he often transfers the same codes, symbols, and characters that have already been protagonists in techniques such as woodcut.
