Carlos Luna was nine, a Cuban kid growing up among the weathered tobacco sheds of Pinar del Rio. He liked to draw, and he was good at it.
"I heard you are winning prizes," a family friend said one day, referring to the accolades bestowed by his humble primary school. "One day I'll see you exhibited next to Pablo Picasso."
It was "an idea launched into time," Luna remembers-- an idea that sailed home earlier this month when he inaugurated his joint exhibit with the renowned Spanish master. Showing at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, in southern Florida, the exhibit couples Luna's strong, stylized paintings with editioned ceramics Picasso created between 1947 and 1971.
"The name alone is intimidating for any artist," Luna said of Picasso, and the idea of sharing museum space with him. "He has signified many proposals."
One of these proposals involves referencing, almost codifying, the world around them. Like Picasso, Luna has developed personal symbols that recur in his paintings. Picasso's checkered harlequin finds a friend in Luna's mustachioed Guajiro-Man, and in Catalina, the beautiful woman who represents Luna's wife, Claudia, and a creative force.
Another common motif, a 50s-style airplane, "is practically me," Luna said, "dreaming of the possibility of moving freely and also returning to your country."
But Luna says Picasso also helped him unlock a central idea-- that he could only reach forward by building on tradition. As an example, he cites the powerful religious images, or beatos, that his grandmother hung in her home in Cuba. They later inspired his primitive style.
suggested trim//"There was a lot of terror in these images," Luna says. "And they had a primitivism, and also an uncommon beauty. I thought, 'Why does my grandmother have things like this? My grandmother was so calm.'"
Luna would leave Cuba’s western province to study at Havana’s prestigious Academia de San Alejandro, the National School of the Arts, and the Visual Arts College. But his work would stay rooted in Cuba's countryside. In 1991, he moved to Puebla, Mexico, where he met his wife, Claudia Ramirez.
Her image appears in many paintings, a feminine symbol of "the calm of the port, where I clear away my doubts," Luna said.
In 2002, Luna and Ramirez moved to Miami, where they live with their three children and a lovelorn boxer pup. Luna quickly established himself with exhibits across the United States, and was named artist-in-residence at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale earlier this year.
The move placed Luna closer to Cuba's exile community, and it has brought nostalgia too. In his painting The Cake and the Flies, he depicts Catalina lying down, her body taking the shape of Cuba. A swarm of his phallic, 50s-era planes hovers all around, like gnats.
"They are going around and around, looking for a place to land, frozen in time," Luna said. "We are two million Cubans (living outside Cuba), crazy to land."
Like so many of his paintings, Luna says the idea for this one came from workaday life in rural Cuba. He was making the dusty trip from Havana to his home in Pinar del Rio, and he saw a sidewalk vendor swatting at flies with his spatula, as he fried eggs. The image stuck.
Other paintings are explicitly political. El Gran Mambo depicts the severed head of Fidel Castro on a platter as the Guajiro-Man looks on.
"I have no plan to return to Cuba," Luna said. Nor does he believe the trip is necessary for his work. "I am Cuba. I am a piece of earth. I'm not interested in what you see on the surface of my skin. I'm interested in what runs in the veins."
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The exhibition, Pablo PICASSO Ceramics/Carlos LUNA Paintings, is on view at the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale Thursday, October 2, 2008 through Monday, February 23, 2009.
Carlos Luna was nine, a Cuban kid growing up among the weathered tobacco sheds of Pinar del Rio. He liked to draw, and he was good at it.
"I heard you are winning prizes," a family friend said one day, referring to the accolades bestowed by his humble primary school. "One day I'll see you exhibited next to Pablo Picasso."
It was "an idea launched into time," Luna remembers-- an idea that sailed home earlier this month when he inaugurated his joint exhibit with the renowned Spanish master. Showing at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, in southern Florida, the exhibit couples Luna's strong, stylized paintings with editioned ceramics Picasso created between 1947 and 1971.
"The name alone is intimidating for any artist," Luna said of Picasso, and the idea of sharing museum space with him. "He has signified many proposals."
One of these proposals involves referencing, almost codifying, the world around them. Like Picasso, Luna has developed personal symbols that recur in his paintings. Picasso's checkered harlequin finds a friend in Luna's mustachioed Guajiro-Man, and in Catalina, the beautiful woman who represents Luna's wife, Claudia, and a creative force.
Another common motif, a 50s-style airplane, "is practically me," Luna said, "dreaming of the possibility of moving freely and also returning to your country."
But Luna says Picasso also helped him unlock a central idea-- that he could only reach forward by building on tradition. As an example, he cites the powerful religious images, or beatos, that his grandmother hung in her home in Cuba. They later inspired his primitive style.
suggested trim//"There was a lot of terror in these images," Luna says. "And they had a primitivism, and also an uncommon beauty. I thought, 'Why does my grandmother have things like this? My grandmother was so calm.'"
