FUSTER brings genius and image into Cuban painting. Virginia Alberdi. 2007.

Virginia Alberdi
february de 2007

Freshness, spontaneity, Cubaness are unquestionable identity elements in the work of one of the most renowned Cuban creators, a home-grown criollo that has known how to enrich painting with the force of expression of popular ingenuity, but also with the sagacity of transforming that charm into art: that is how FUSTER has, by his own right, a well-deserved place in Cuban painting today.

This assessment corresponds to the spirit that this authentic, good-hearted and cheerful creator has impregnated into his work, having endowed Cuban visual arts, since the 1990s, in an indisputably skilful way, with an unmistakable iconography that is witty and charming, and in which the painter turned chronicler of all these years has taken to his canvasses and papers certain moments, characters and elements that identify Cubans, their idiosyncrasy, their attachment to certain given ways and the appearance of new elements that have been incorporated into popular imagery.

We are surprised by the mastery of a technique such as water colours, in which the artist’s imagination overflows in order to put together a firmly yet loosely traced sketch and the colours that identify the brightness that the tropical sun has impregnated into this whole World that it illuminates and heats.

Thus, this obstinate, teasing and cajoling myth maker has also populated his canvasses with the painting of a whole array of an insular imagery that conforms, in the perpetual chaos of these characters and situations, presented in the midst of a shining chromatic explosion, those scenes that “find their perfect proportion in a conceptual proposal that hierarchically arranges symbols and signals allusive to the icons of Cuban culture as well as to matters of universal reflection, related to domestic and local customs as well as to ethical-philosophical speculations,” as I myself once expressed when presenting one of his exhibits.

Being a chronicler of an epoch that he has illuminated with the colourfulness and the sensibility of an eloquent griot, his attention moves to the simple people that, endowed with the imprint of a rich chromatic range, travel “by camel” –that sui generis vehicle which is a product of necessity and of the ingenuity of criollos— that mitigates the pressing present-day need for means of public transportation; or enjoy a dinner sitting around a table with home-grown fruits and fish, because this painter’s perpetual proximity to the coastline reflects on the eating habits of his characters. In another series of this tireless creator, the automobiles rescued from the 1940s and the 1950s, real museum pieces that travel along the streets of Cuban cities on a daily basis, occupy a leading role. When developing Fuster’s chronicles, reference must be made to music, the musicality that Cubans boast of, and which is patent in the animated representation of musicians: guitar players, bongo players, rattle players, dancing couples, all of them evoking son, country songs and other types of rhythms among those that animate the Cuban universe of sound.

The insular fauna, especially alligators and crocodiles, that evoke the silhouette of the largest of the greater Caribbean islands, also finds a space in Fuster’s paintings. Women with their round bodies and their long, loose hair; peasants with large-brimmed hats travel, love each other, play dominoes, dine and enjoy in a constant feast thanks to the prodigious imagination of this artist that has endowed Cuban visual arts with the effect of a glance of a Picassian drawing, exalted colouring and a vigorous spirit that does not lack the uninhibited religiosity that allows a representation of African deities in a syncretic communion with Christian images.

The drawing that initially, back in the 1960s, supported the young ceramist’s tri-dimensional creations, matured, became independent and has ever since reasserted itself in this type of painting that identifies him today and led him to become the multiplier of icons that enriches all that is in view and communicates a whole array of essences.

Fuster is, in the last analysis, the painter of a certain state of mind, of the transit between popular things forgotten and popular things conquered, a spiral that ascends in order to secure, with his own tone and his arrow-pierced soul, one of the most brilliant areas in which Cubaness is projected on a universal scale.