After a few years without exhibiting his work, Lázaro Saavedra evidences again in Galería Habana his very special place in contemporary art. The exhibition confirms him as the great painting chronicler of life in Cuba and its popular philosopher. Chronicler because he has followed the daily events of the Cubans as well as the artistic development in the island, so much related to them. Philosopher because, more than just narrating, he reflects on the profound implications of the things that happen, and particularly on the contradictions of a utopia in crisis, but existing as daily experience. Popular, because, in addition to having a professional education and being a university professor, his art results directly from information and experience, as part of a very popular stratum of the population in which he continues to be involved. Words to the catalog of the exhibition “La imagen del pensamiento, el pensamiento de la imagen” (The Image of Thought, the Thought of the Image) 1993, Galería Habana.

Moreover, Saavedra is one of our great humorists. He practices a deconstructive humor of the absurdity of the rhetoric and the reality in which he is involved. His humor is not ironical, because it implies a participation in the complex situations he mocks. Although reflexive, it is not a brain humor in the fashion of the Cuban draftsman-humorist of the sixties Chago Armada, but a festive one. In this regard, nothing resembles his work as much as popular jokes. All above-mentioned has made him a paradigm of that mocking, festive ingredient that characterizes a large part of the Cuban art emerged in the mid-eighties.

Saavedra also has a long and stormy performance as one of the sharpest art critics in Cuba. Again, it is not only the analysis of concrete current issues: his critique frequently goes as far as giving profound thought to general problems of the human being, society, the role of art and culture… His work is an ethical discourse with hopes of the improvement of life.

At the same time, we are perhaps facing a case in which the critique, although structural to an artistic construction and therefore allegorical, has been expressed more directly, without roundabouts. Saavedra is a voice of the street inside the gallery. More than an intellectual acting as critical conscience, he is a representative of the popular strata using an intellectual language to discuss reality approachedfrom the interests and points of view extended among the Cuban population. It is a significant paradox that the cartoons and comic strips of the artist do not fill the Cuban press organs, one of the natural spaces for his work. He has had to focus almost exclusively on presenting his work in galleries and museums—a more tolerant zone—in the form of a very peculiar art that combines installation with the objects, the strip cartoon and graphic humor.

An essential value of this art is to break the aura of the gallery work by virtue of its poor presentation, of its lack of interest in the finishing or even in the simple care when preparing the pieces. They are like toilet drawings, graffiti and spontaneous worldly expressions. But the rupture of the Work’s aura with capital letter occurs even more because of the very sense of the works, aimed at a sudden, demystifying communication, in the fashion of humor. Saavedra treats the gallery as if it were a mass medium.

In this exhibition he presented works of two different types. The strip cartoons are complex tabulations of more symbolic and indirect meanings. The philosophical line of his work prevails in them. The other pieces are drawings that broach close, daily themes, like the author’s experience in the micro brigades, doing construction work in the hope of solving his severe housing problem. Two of these pieces stand out as symbols of great impact. One of them is a map with the island of Cuba extending southward as if it were a continent,. This unusual cartography locally hyperbolizes the famous pole inversion made by Torres-García. It highlights the good and bad of the Cuban Latin American spirit: Cuban flag inside the chest, hammer and sickle on the word and the United States and its dollars on the head. Few summaries are more eloquent of today’s contradictions...

Gerardo Mosquera