manuscript in a bottle is the title of Arturo Montoto’s personal exhibition that will be inaugurated on Friday, January 20 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MoCaa), located in Kendall, Miami Dade, Florida.
The exhibition brings together twelve oil paintings on canvas made mostly during the “pandemic” months. It constitutes a cut in one of the artist’s best-known lines of work: tropical fruits. This time they are not, as if carelessly placed, in enigmatic places, but, on the contrary, they occupy an absolute foreground on the canvas.
Manuscript…, as usual in Montoto’s career, is not a title taken at random. He alludes to the gesture of launching a call for help to the sea, hoping that it will pick it up and a receptive soul will respond empathically. He talks about Cuba’s double insularity, geographical and political, the latter aggravated by an economic crisis of colossal dimensions.
The artist, like modern Robinson, is prevented from going beyond the shoreline not only because of the “damn circumstance” of the water delimiting everything, but also because of the enormous difficulties that opting for a United States visa from La Havana. So he won’t be able to attend the opening.
Montoto’s work, charged with conceptual density, is based on pregnancy, a quality of the figures to be quickly captured in an apparently simple way, either by the arrangement of the shapes or by the careful study of color. Many times the ultimate meaning of the piece is masked in the intertextuality that occurs between the represented object and the title of the piece. For me, his work all has a metaphysical background and a veiled surreal vocation.
This is how Montoto defines the paths along which his endeavors follow:
“My current work is the result of an investigation in the field of pictorial visuality of post-Renaissance heritage, modeled by the representational resources of the Western tradition. I am greatly interested in the way in which the historical baroque displays its theatricality and converges in that zone of silence that Italian metaphysicians have preserved since their late medieval ancestors. The event frozen in time and the unfinished narrative mark the space in which the shadows converge, marked by light, and point to an object of daily insignificance, frugal and simple, unusual and strange, but also hedonic and, at times, ironic. . I want my work to transcend the pure aspect of the naive belief in veristic representation and attract the viewer towards a space for reflection on the intentions of identifying what is represented with reality through the conventions of identity and similarity in which we have been educated. ”.
The curatorship of Manuscript… It is in charge of Jorge Rodriguez Diez (R10), the well-known Cuban designer released in January 2023 as director of the MoCaa. R10 recalls that Rufo Caballero, a notable critic who died prematurely, told him “that all of Montoto’s speech was based on deep intellectual convictions”, and warned him not to let himself be carried away by appearances, because “beyond the almost absolute domain of technique beat deep philosophical reflections on superimposed planes”. The curator confesses:
“I then began to see his pieces with different eyes. I do not try to guess today what is behind each piece. It is enough for me to gradually incorporate certainties, slowly, without any rush, about the meaning of his pictorial work. All philosophy —without distinguishing between Eastern and Western— is based on the observation of how the universal subject tends to complicate the elemental essences of existence. And in the foundation of such a study he begins to become entangled in such a way that he passes cleanly over the subject and ends up becoming entangled and tripping over his own feet. Perhaps Montoto’s work tries to put a stop to this delusion and from apparently simple compositions and discursive structures returns to the basal instant where complementary realities coexist in perfect balance. It is enough to pull a thread to begin to confuse everything. It is when the complication of existence begins. His pieces alert us, at least to me, of the danger of losing the center and failing to see the meaning of ‘the thing’”.
MoCaa projection
The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas was inaugurated on November 11, 2022, in the facilities of what until then was the Kendall Art Center, seat of the Rodríguez Collection, of Leonardo Rodríguez and family. For its opening the Museum had three exhibitions: Subverting Materials: Textile and Fiber Art by Woman Artist, curated by Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig; Ceramics: Omnipresence Matter, from The Fine Arts Ceramic Center, curated by Ivonne Ferrer; Y The Rodriguez Collection at MoCaa-Americas, curated by Jorge Rodríguez Diez.
Asked about the main lines of work of the institution under his responsibility, R10 tells us that the purpose of the museum is to promote and make visible the art of the Americas in the Kendall community, first, and by extension in Miami-Dade county and south florida.
Among the samples that can be seen this year at the MoCaa, is the collective in homage to Carmen Herrera (Havana, 1915-New York, 2022), with a large list of women artists including Sandra Ceballos, Cirenaica Moreira, Milena Martínez Pedrosa and Liudmila Velasco among the participants.
A two-person show by Rigoberto Mena and Jo Ann Rothschild, another by Florencio Gelabert, and the one integrated with works by Reynerio Tamayo and Rubén Alpízar are scheduled for later. In addition, he plans to do something with the work of photographer Raúl Cañibano. All this, as far as Cuban art is concerned.
R10 is also focused on showcasing American artists. I would like to do a MidWest landscape show, with artists from there; one dedicated to Venezuela; and others in which Brazilian, Colombian and Mexican artists would participate.
Other projects that will be accepted by the MoCaa are related to artistic ceramics, one of the pillars of the Museum’s collection, and would be in charge of Ivonne Ferrer. In due time they will be revealed.
Success for Arturo Montoto in his personal exhibition and for R10, a colleague for several years at OnCubaat the head of this new cultural institution that will demand all their creativity and work capacity, attributes that are their own.
