Gory, photographer and painter: “Art has to have strength and soul”

Havana, Cuba. -A reunion with my friend the painter and photographer Rogelio López Marín (Gory) that I imagined in a chronicle that I wrote 20 years ago, came true in December 2015 when, during my first visit to Miami, I had the immense pleasure of attending the inauguration, in the Aluna Art Foundation gallery, of the retrospective for the 40 years (1975-2015) of Gory’s artistic career.

For more bliss, my book Los Tigres de Dire Dawa It was presented a few days later, also in Aluna Art Foundation, with Gory’s works as a backdrop (of course there was John Lennon’s photo with the real palms and the tuba that belonged to his grandfather).

After that reunion, we have continued in contact, and so I have been able to rejoice in the triumphs in the music of Your son Adriánand accompany him in his pain for death, several years ago, his wife, the poet Lucía Ballester.

A few days ago I got Gory to overcome his usual modesty, stop in his occupations and access this questionnaire to answer Cubanet.

“You said that when you were a teenager, before you decided to dedicate yourself to painting and photography, you wanted to be a musician, and that you did not go because you had very bad musical ear. I don’t think so. What do you think?

“I was always passionate about music.” At eight years I entered a music school, or more exactly, I attended for a week. Enough time to receive a wise advice from a teacher who urged me to look for something else that could interest me out of music, based on my frightening melodic and rhythmic ear. That opened my eyes, but at the same time the ears to listen to music without technical prejudices, in the same way that I enjoy a painting or photography (so it transmits the image, not because of technical virtuosity or by a story that art theorists invent you). Art is not only technical, it has to have strength and soul. Over the years I have discovered that the ear to listen is independent of the musical ear and that both require different types of training.

“Your mom, Thelvia Marínshe was a painter, sculptor and writer. How did it influence you?

―The family environment is decisive. For me it was a blessing to grow in a stable home, with cultured parents, sensitive, arts lovers. My mother was a multidisciplinary artist with whom I learned daily, not only from life but of art. It was the absolute support for what we decided to do any of the three brothers. Having a childhood in which your mother’s painting and sculpture study was the place where you played with brushes, paintings, mud, plaster; in which many of the walks go to museums, theaters and concerts and in which you spend hours listening to music with your parents in a decent audio team was much more than you could ask in the midst of the absolute destruction of a country.

―In the 1980s you were one of the most important artists of Cuban plastic. In 1981, you and Flavio Garciandía, José Bedia, Tomás Sánchez and seven other artists marked a new course with the exposure volume I, but the break with the institutional aesthetic canons disgusted the Castro cultural commissioners and accused them of “ideological fun” and of being “foreignizers.” Tell us of those times.

“On those old stories, much has been written.” Around them myths, fables and inaccurate stories have been built. It was a time when we had a lot of fun with what they later labeled as “fun” instead of fun. It was something that simply happened and the dogmas and censorship of the time helped to turn it into an event. Maybe it was a luck in the midst of misfortune. A sip of water in the desert …

“How do you feel more comfortable, as a painter or as a photographer?”

―My passion for photography dates from the same era of passion for music, childhood. I spent hours at my paternal grandfather’s house (doctor by profession and great photography fan) accompanying him in the dark room while revealing photos or leafing through his magazine collection Popular Photography. With the painting, I always left the photographic model and photomontages with which I built ideas that led to painting. Graduate of the School of Painting, I was prevented from working for being classified as “ideological fun”, an honorary title that I try to exercise until today. Thanks to a great friend, Aldo Menéndez, who managed to insert himself in the magazine of the Ministry of Culture as a photographer, learned that trade and went to that category. From that moment on, those of the photography guild considered me a painter and those of the painters’ guild considered me a photographer. I have worked a lot in the two disciplines without considering them exclusive, but complementary.

“What reasons took you to exile?” Does it weigh you to have made that decision?

―The reasons that led to exile to millions of Cubans persist since I was five years old and I already have 72. How could anyone regret having been able to escape a condemnation of indignity and misery of more than six decades?

“How was your artistic work in exile?”

―He could survive in exile with a family doing what I always did is the most important achievement. If you add that my work has been included in the collections of multiple American museums and having received recognition for my work, I would say that everything went well.