Comfort zone, war zone

Roberto González (Havana, 1972) believes that one of the main functions of art is to help heal. That’s what he told me years ago, when I interviewed him for this same space. Then I affirmed that, in addition to being a very gifted painter, he is a deep thinker, someone who creates careful metaphors to reveal and question his life circumstances, which are those of his contemporaries on this shore of life.

erto González in his studio, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

His pieces rarely turn to the intimate. He tries to express himself not as a suffering being, but as someone who carries belligerent lucidity ahead. The world is explained and explained as he sees it, with a lyrical background, although not without heartbreak. He does not expose the world as it is, nor as it should be, but as he is determined to believe it is. And one can accommodate or not to his visions, share or refute them, but in no case remain indifferent to his paintings, which over time have gained splendor in their execution and depth in their depth.

Comfort zone, war zone — Roberto González in his studio, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Now Roberto exposes comfort zone in Old Havana, a collection that has an ironic look as its presupposition. What is shown there is like those Chinese boxes that contain in their guts multiple smaller boxes, which must be accessed —such the layers of meaning— uncovering them one by one, until finding the numen that speaks through the mouth of the artist.

I have chosen five pieces of comfort zone to display them in this column. It is only a small portion of what the sensitive viewer can find in the House of Mexico.

I receive “ornamental sovereignty” as a speech against the rigidity, the excessive codification of symbols. Like coins, slogans and slogans wear out with constant transfer. They lose their primary effectiveness —if they ever had one— and they remain like something kitschempty, dead.

“Waiting for the miracle.” Inertia, passivity, the belief that solutions will or will not come from above. Not understanding yourself as part of the problem or part of the solution. The immobile longing, the evanescent hope, the passivity of the dream.

“Night Dialogue.” The conditions are apparently created for exchange between equals. Communication as a two-way street. But the interlocutors are missing. It is a dialogue without dialogue, a conversation, if anything, between ghosts.

“Home, sweet home.” Irony at its finest. Home, the idyllic refuge, is usually a war zone. Front line in the confrontation of egos. Minefield, first; and then razed. This work goes against appearances, against what is pretended to be harmonious coexistence.

“Until the last drop” does not require further comments. Strong piece is in lyrical packaging, a discursive strategy that the artist is very good at. A squeezer that could be a vise or a carpentry clamp: what you hold, squeeze, squeeze. The “you can always do more”. The “now we are going to…”. “Resist creatively.”

Roberto González comes from Magritte and Chirico, from Redon and Iturria. It does not bother him that the inquisitive eye finds features in his works of those artists on whom he has built his poetics. It is his very Cuban visual repertoire, also his insular sensitivity, which avoids the stridency of color, and everything that seems false as a cliché.

I find that he has grown as a creator. His solutions are increasingly pictorial, detached from the initial graphic solutions (which were very good, it must be said), in favor of an elaboration where the backgrounds take on greater expressive value.

Good gift this year’s end for Havana residents who love art. Those who want to broaden their gaze while understanding, as the poet suggests, that on the edge of the road there will always be a dangerous chair that invites them to stop.