Cuban American Adrián López Ballester lives as passionate about music as his father, painter and photographer Rogelio López Marín (Gory).
Havana, Cuba. – More than 50 years ago, when I was a teenager from the rock fan viper, Rogelio López Marín (Gory) dreamed of being a musician, but ―segun He has confessed– He had lousy musical ear and rock was outlawed: then he dedicated himself to painting and photography.
Gory would become one of the most important Cuban artists of his generation. In 1981, together with Flavio Garciandía, José Bedia, Tomás Sánchez And seven other young artists, marked new directions in Cuban plastic with the exhibition Volume I.. But when breaking with the institutional aesthetic canons, the works of that Expo bothered the cultural commissioners of Castroism, who considered them “foreigners” and accused their authors of promoting “ideological fun.”
Based in Miami since 1991, Gory, despite the worries of exile and subtracting time from his own artistic creation, has managed to realize his dream of being a musician through his son, Adrián López Ballester.
Adrián is 38 years old. He arrived in Miami with his exiled parents when he was four years old. He speaks in Spanish as fluently as in English. It is considered as Cuban as American; He feels both at the same time. Therefore, the same thinks about Cuban cinema as on the policy of the United States.
As passionate about music as his father, Adrián, who graduated in musical composition at the University of Florida, in 2004, when he was 17 years old; and recorded four experimental demos, influenced by Ernesto LecuonaAstor Piazolla and African music, in which he played the three and the marímbula.
In 2010 he created the similar progressive rock band, where he was a guitarist and singer, and with which he recorded the records Similar prisoners (2010), My World Keeps Falling (2013), False Flags (2016), FRIGNEING SIGHTS … IMPERIAL DELIGHTS (2017), Take no prisoners (2020) and Blue Bible (2024). In those albums, almost all the songs, reminiscent of psychedelic rock from the late 1960s, were composed of Adrián, who says he is influenced by the music of The Beatles, King Crimson and Frank Zappa.
For next December the album must come out Garden of Eveby The B Sides, Adrián López’s new project with Chris Alvy. In the album songs, in which both sing, Adrián touches guitar, bass, piano, melotron, organ and electricity; and Chris, guitar, drums, percussion and bass.
Gory does not weigh the long pause he has made in his artistic career to devote himself to producing Adrián’s albums in the recording studio built in his own home; He only regrets not having at his side to share pride in the achievements of his son, his wife, the late painter and poet Lucía Ballester.
Gory ensures that “the music that Adrian makes is fully inscribed in the culture of exile – not of the diaspora, which is a term that tends to disperse and confuse -, which is part, no matter how much the castrist commissioner, of the Cuban culture, increasingly diverse, plural, multicultural.”
