by Roxana M. Barmejo (Contribution by), Kendall Art Center (Author)
The three great Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands: Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, represented at the Kendall Art Center, with a sample of works by some of their most relevant contemporary visual artists. "The repeating Island", curated by Roxana M. Bermejo, brings together creators who in all cases are exponents of a history that surpasses the picturesque and the provincial, as well as a misunderstood origin that is inserted in cosmopolitan and avant-garde art without giving up their own postulates and searches, without depriving themselves to continue delving into the traces of heritage mystical rituals, of inherited rhythms of extreme sensuality, of landscapes with colorful highlights and icons and native traditions shared by these three territories in whose current different identities and common features are discovered.Their visual vocabularies seem forged with a truly exuberant vital energy and a baroque style that led Carpentier, through a very particular poetic, to establish the concept of the "Real Maravilloso". In these works, the spirit of projecting the soul of the region never diminishes, which smells like a mixture of coffee, rum, tobacco and sweat of Ta nos, Blacks, Creoles and Mulattos; a mixture that compares with a crucible where they merge and arrived in the Caribbean from different parts of the world, contributing ingredients to the Ajiaco. Aldo Men ndez