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Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado)

PRESS

Making Waves
In the hands of Cuban artist Kcho, boats, docks, and oars become potent symbols of migration
By Rosa Lowinger

In Ghent earlier this year, the Cuban artist Kcho leaned over the side of a small motorboat to lay strips of wood on the Lys River. He had been commissioned by the city of Ghent and its Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst to create new work for the group exhibition "Over the Edge." It had been raining for three days, and his Belgian assistants wondered why Kcho, wet and covered with mud, chose to plot the dimensions of his on-site installation in the freezing weather rather than sketch his idea on paper and contract an engineer to build it. Kcho explained that he first needed to "make the drawing in the river" himself by using the cast-off wood he found in the city's harbor. The completed piece, on view through the third of this month, is a 66-foot-long dock that spirals out into the water from a medieval castle on the riverbank.

Water--its presence usually just implied--is a powerful point of reference for Kcho (pronounced KAH-cho). Docks, boats, oars, rafts, inner tubes, and debris washed up from the ocean are among the objects he has included in his installations. For the 30-year-old artist, creating work that points to the sea is a natural result of having been born and raised on a small island off the southern coast of Cuba. "Where I grew up, all the limits were liquid," says the artist, who is now based in Havana. To reach the main island required a four-hour boat ride.

Travel and migration in the context of his country's recent history also figure prominently in Kcho's work. In 1994, just months before a massive wave of emigrants embarked for Florida from all over Cuba's northern coast, he created La regata (The Regatta), a flotilla of toy boats and beach debris--rocks, driftwood, twigs, pieces of rubber--that was installed in one of the fortresses that line the Havana harbor, as part of the Fifth Havana Bienal. Lo mejor del verano (The Best of Summer) was created that same year for "Cocido y crudo" (Cooked and Raw), an exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, organized by Dan Cameron, now senior curator of Manhattan's New Museum. That installation included rowboats, kayaks, bits of wood, oars, baskets, and fishing nets suspended from the ceiling and reflected in the black polished floor. One had the impression of being submerged in water, witnessing a shipwreck from below.

"People went into that gallery and cried," says Manuel E. González, a Cuban exile and current director of the art program for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, describing how the installation evoked the tragic fate of so many Cubans who have taken to the seas over the years. And while his choice of imagery draws directly from the collective psyche of his nation, Kcho's penchant for discarded objects mirrors the contemporary Cuban practice of salvaging and recycling materials because of the scarcity of basic items. "Kcho is the quintessential Cuban artist of the 'Special Period,' " says González, referring to the era of economic crisis in Cuba that began after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Today, Kcho is celebrated as the island's most internationally established artist since Wifredo Lam (1902-82). In the last decade, his poetic and sometimes nostalgic works have been featured in more than 50 group shows and biennials around the world and in 15 solo exhibitions, at such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles (1997), the Jeu de Paume in Paris (1998), and the Palacio de Cristal at the Reina Sofía (2000). Para olvidar (To Forget), an installation consisting of a rowboat set atop a pile of empty and half-empty beer bottles, won the $50,000 grand prize at the 1995 Kwangju Biennale in South Korea. The artist's first show in the United States took place in 1996 at New York's Barbara Gladstone gallery, which continues to represent him. His work sells for between $4,000 for a drawing and $75,000 for larger sculptures. Many of his pieces are in the collection of major museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana.

In all of his installations, Kcho tends to use the same basic vocabulary of images and objects associated with the sea. "He works with few symbols, but every time you see a new drawing or a boat, it's like seeing it for the first time," says Alma Ruiz, assistant curator at MoCA in Los Angeles, who organized Kcho's 1997 exhibition "Todo cambia" (Everything Changes). The artist created two installations for the show. One was a series of totemic sculptures of unbaked clay and wire fashioned in the forms of a raft, sailboat, kayak, oar, and inner tube. The other consisted of a large boat constructed of wooden racks of the sort used by Havana booksellers and filled with Spanish, English, and French texts representing a wide range of literature available in Cuba. Visitors were encouraged to board the boat and spend time reading the books. "These works have tremendous physicality," remarks Ruiz. "Just like him."

Kcho's presence is palpable even before he enters a room. At Casa de las Americas, a Havana cultural institution where he recently showed, he could be heard thundering down the hall, calling out to friends he had not seen since his residency at Alexander Calder's studio outside Paris. Not especially tall but as thick and solid as a football linebacker, Kcho was in constant motion, dominating the offices of Casa de las Americas with his voice, enormous smile, and seemingly boundless energy. It was a hot day, and he pulled off his shirt, cinched his pants with a rope belt, put the shirt back on, then shouted to fellow artist Tania Bruguera, literally lifting her off her feet as he hugged her. One gallery assistant offered him water and another brought out highball glasses with ice and Chivas Regal. This was star treatment, Cuban-style.

"I'm so happy that this place would invite me to do this show in Cuba, where my friends are and the people I love," he said that day, talking at breakneck speed. "The last time I exhibited in Cuba was in '97 at the Bienal. I wanted to do the MoCA show here but no one wanted it."

Kcho's lament is familiar among young Cuban artists, and it is due, in part, to the political subtext that exists in much of their work. In the 1980s, many artists were making art that overtly critiqued the government. This led to censorship and, finally, mass emigration of many of the island's most prominent figures, such as José Bedia, who now lives in Miami. Now, a decade later, the artists of Kcho's generation tend to cloak their messages in poetry and symbolism.

The Casa de las Americas show, which ended in March, was modest in size, but Kcho nevertheless managed to use the awkwardly divided gallery and low ceiling to their best advantage to convey his themes of migration and impermanence. The most effective piece was a simple boat made of chain-link fencing that filled almost an entire room. The boat's prow protruded through a narrow doorway between rooms, and one got inside the boat by walking through an opening in the prow. "Upon entering the gallery, we were obligated to board the boat," says Cuban curator Cristina Vives, recalling her visit to the exhibition with a group of curators from Minneapolis. "Those who went inside became temporary travelers, emigrants, and those of us who chose to stay outside--on land, as it were--watched this mass of humanity crowded together like immigrants on any latitude of the planet." The title of the installation, No me agradezcan el silencio (Do Not Thank Me for Silence) is typically poetic and ambiguous.

"Kcho's titles are essential to understanding his work," says Ruiz. "He is purposely enigmatic so he can say things indirectly. 'Todo cambia,' the title of his show at MoCA, was his way of saying that in the island everything changes, but everything stays the same." Kcho explains that his titles play a role in his art-making process. "I was in a bar last night, having a beer with one of my assistants. A small thing suddenly became something: don't hammer two nails in one line. I was explaining it to him and, at the same time, I knew the expression would be the starting point for a new work. I have notebooks full of phrases like that," says Kcho. "Sometimes it takes me a year or more to do something with them, but my process always begins with the title."

Kcho was born in 1970 on the Isla de la Juventud. His father, a carpenter, had always wanted to name a son Cacho, which means "chunk" or "piece." His mother, the person in charge of the decorations for the island's annual carnival, protested, and he was named Alexis Leyva Machado. Still, the nickname stuck throughout his youth. In high school, the artist changed the spelling. "Crooks had aliases, I wanted one, too," he wrote in the catalogue for "La columna infinita."

Kcho learned to use hand tools and to make wooden toys from his father. "If I had not gone to art school," he says, "I would have ended up a carpenter like him." But he began early academic training in art, after a local teacher was impressed by his talent. He attended school on his island until he was 14, when he was accepted into the prestigious Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Havana, Cuba's national fine-arts school. He began as a painter but soon switched to sculpture because, he says, "painting seemed too methodical, too much about process, and there's an element of deceit in it." Now he eschews most applied color in his work, but he credits his painting background for enabling him "to see that trash also has color."

Unlike many Cuban artists of his generation, Kcho was not accepted at the Instituto Superior de Arte, the university level of the fine-arts school. Consequently, he began his professional career much earlier than most. At the age of 21, he was in group shows in Havana and Caracas and was given a solo exhibition at the Havana gallery Centro de Arte 23 y 12. Titled "Paisaje popular cubano" (Cuban Folk Landscape), the show featured Kcho's 1990 La peor de las trampas (The Worst of Traps), a ladder made of branches that culminate in fake palm fronds and whose rungs are machete blades, and the elegantly spare Como el garabato se parece a Cuba (How the Hook Resembles Cuba), a 1991 piece consisting of a farmer's grass-cutting tool that looks remarkably like the profile of the island.

In 1992 Kcho traveled outside of Cuba for the first time to participate in shows in Mexico, Holland, Belgium, and Spain. While abroad, he encountered works by artists who had been influencing him for years. "Picasso and Duchamp are gods," says Kcho. More direct influences come from the work of Constantin Brancusi and the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. A los ojos de la historia (To the Eyes of History), Kcho's 1992 spiral tower made of twigs, sticks, and twine, was modeled after Tatlin's never-realized Model for the Monument to the Third International (1919-20). Kcho's tower, however, is topped with a used conical fabric coffee filter, recycling a failed monument into a quasi-functional item.

Kcho makes frequent reference to Brancusi in his "La columna infinita" series. Since 1995, he has been constructing columns composed of everything from bent wood to stacked boats to rubber inner tubes to bottles. The recent show at the Palacio de Cristal brought together eleven of these pieces from collections around the world.

Sly political references are tucked here and there throughout Kcho's work. Included in the Madrid show was a series of drawings of docks--each dock in the shape of a letter that spells out, among other things, Elián, the first name of the six-year-old Cuban boy who survived a boat wreck and whose contested custody put a spotlight on Cuban-American relations.

Like most Cuban artists, Kcho rejects a purely political understanding of his work. Still, sometimes he cannot help having the political discussion imposed on him. His 1996 show at Barbara Gladstone was picketed by angry Cuban exiles who claimed that any support for a Cuban artist directly assists the Castro regime. The following year he was denied an entry visa by the U.S., making it impossible for him to create the wall drawing that was to be part of the MoCA show. Once it became clear that no amount of lobbying by MoCA would overturn the U.S. decision, the artist had Ruiz include their correspondence and the rejection notice from the State Department as part of the installation that contained the book racks.

Meanwhile, Kcho has been able to travel to different parts of the world for numerous exhibitions. And when he's home in Havana--where the money he makes from sales abroad affords him a degree of wealth--Kcho enjoys an international cachet. Wherever he is, when discussing his work he continues to stress its universal themes--travel, nostalgia, loss, and impermanence--rather than letting it be pigeonholed as purely political. After all, he says, "Cuba is not Fidel alone. . . . Cuba is also its
artists."

Rosa Lowinger is a writer and art conservator living in Los Angeles.

KCHO

Drawing is central to the practice of Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado, born on the Isla de la juventud, Cuba, 1970). In this regard, he is like many of his compatriot artists, for whom drawing is a way of visualizing, a visual language for experimenting with an idea. Drawing in the Cuban practice as in that of many artists---- one thinks of the brilliant drawing output of Bruce Nauman--- is the medium ideally suited to conceptual thinking since it can be direct and unfettered by technical gadgetry, allowing the passage from mind to hand to visual ground almost instantaneously. The Chinese knew this. In the Chinese amateur tradition, as opposed to the academic, painting and writing held the place above all other art media, conjoined by the use of the same tools: paper or silk, brush, ink stone, ink stick, water. In the case of Kcho, the mention of Chinese painting is more than casual.

Kcho is best known for his installations. The drawings are in many cases the visual beginning of the sculptural idea within space. The monumental Archipiélago de mi pensamiento (1997) that Kcho showed at the sixth Bienal de La Habana grew from the drawing of a vertical stacking of boats. It is like Noah's ark in its scale, and as varied, with tables, boats, ropes, wire spools, a surfboard, and a makeshift antenna. It also recalls the makeshift floating villages of the film Waterworld as it floats on an undersized puddle of bottles. Virtually all of Kcho's imagery can be found in this work, and nearly all his strategies converge in it. In the drawing, the form is topped by a sail, and an oar lies beside it on the floor at the foot of a figure.

Like all strong artists, his forms suggest many things, with more unfolding as association is triggered. In Kcho's case, this multiple array of meanings opens out without an extra line, with no sacrifice of simplicity. He is one of those artists with a seemingly infallible ability to say it in drawing. His ability to suggest transformation is supported by this skill. He does this by shifting context of found objects. Using one thing to serve a purpose for which it was never intended is the Cuban way to survival. Kcho turns it into an aesthetic strategy. A propeller in the air suggests not only an airplane, but moves water into the air, and thereby places the viewer under water. He exploited this technique of dislocation perfectly in Lo mejor de verano (1993-94)y suspending boats at the top of a room, with light coming from above through a net that suggests a surface, and a dark floor below. It suggests drowning without a figure or a drop of water.

The drawing is built up in a grid of cross-hatching, like a stack of boat-shaped baskets, not unlike Estructuras similares (1995) made in honor of Vladimir Tatlin and the Model for the Third International. But Kcho places the skeleton of a rowboat leaning against the recognizable form of the Monument, equalizing them in scale, as if to equate the two and make a monument that would serve the grandiose aims of revolution and at the same time honor the fisherman or the balsero. At the same time, the woven form and even its shape recall a fish trap. The square element in the drawing for the Archipiélago resembles a crab pot.

Installations are site-specific. Kcho is a master of the use of space, his mind clearly fired by the volume, shape, and history of the use of the room. The space of the colossal room in which the finished Archipiélago was installed is sketched in white, like a palimpsest, the arches of the room in El Castillo del Morro de La Habana immediately identifiable.

The place that water holds in the Cuban imagination cannot be exaggerated. In the work of artists of his generation, the "odious condition of water all around" and images of boats, rafts, bottles have become clichés. But like many clichés, this icon still carries a terrible truth. The 1994 exodus of thousands of Cubans in boats little more seaworthy than a fish trap ended in death for many. The departure of the balseros was a response in most cases to the privation caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of support for the Cuban economy that had come to depend so heavily on this aid. Fuel sources disappeared. Food was so scarce that it caused a rare protest against the political leadership.

The relationship of death and water is made eloquent in a pair of drawings, one of an upturned boat, the other of a pair of oars. The two are drawn in red, with smears and runs that suggest blood. In anyone else's hands, this could be an outrageous platitude. In Kcho's, it is not. It is completely convincing. The holes in the boat and oars remind me of drawings done by Salvadoran artist Roberto Huezo that depict the victims of torture. The bodies are scarred with burns from cigarettes applied to encourage confession, or possibly just to disfigure and dishonor the dead. Kcho does not draw bodies. He does not need to. He has used boats as stand-ins for bodies before. But the boat easily becomes the back of a body and the oars an abject pair of crossed arms without excessive imagining. They form an elegy for the unknown dead in as simple a visual language as possible.

In Cuba, much seems to hang by a thread. The collapse of the economy led to neglect of the infrastructure both on a public level--- roads in Cuba are a Calvary--- and at home. Cubans invent alternatives. They must. In two drawings, Kcho proposes two mobiles. In one, a pair of rowboats are balanced on a stick that hangs from a cord. The boats can only go in circles, a quiet statement about futility. Another shows an oar as the crossbeam, from which are balanced propellers. The propellers do not spin, powering the motion. Rather they are unfueled, passive as sails that can only move the whole with the force of wind.

In the seventh Bienal de La Habana that just closed, Kcho showed several works in the Convento de San Francisco de Asis. He had already made several works that place a boat on a sea of bottles. Two are titled Para olvidar. The first, done in 1995, brought him international acclaim when he was awarded the prize for it at the Kwangju Biennale. He was 24 years old. Another version done the following year places a kayak on the bottles. The meanings immediately evoked are both about escape: the boat of desperation of the balsero; escape through alcohol, the waters of oblivion. The bottles are a brilliant formal solution to what to do about the base, and in his treacherously vertical Archipiélago, they are the perfect contradiction to stability through their lightness and precariousness. In San Francisco de Asis, Kcho recycles this idea, the sea of bottles, with another that he has used previously, a ready-made, found dock. In El camino de la nostalgia (1996), the dock alone suggests the elegiac state of memory. The placement directly on floor converts that base into motionless water. In the version in San Francisco de Asis, the bottles are, most of them, medical dextrose used in intravenous feeding. The reading, at first glance, is a commentary on the Cuban economy. It is also far more explicit than most of Kcho's works in its grizzliness. The evocation of a hospital or of flotsam of medical waste is more openly horrifying than we expect from him. But at the back of the vast room, overshadowed by the other, colossal works is a minor piece, one that could easily be overlooked altogether. It consists of a stick with a lump of rubble on it. The stick is hooked at the end, like the garabatu used in santería as a signifier of power within the spiritual community. The rubble suggests the escombros all over the city of Havana, where there are piles of rubble from houses that have collapsed or are being torn down before they do. In two drawings, what look like overturned boats break the back of a fragile structure, like the chunk of rubble that seems to snap the emblem of spiritual authority in the work in the Convento. In one a boat or giant boulder breaks an oar. The oar is attenuated, made fragile by its exaggerated length. In another, the boat/ boulder breaks a flimsy table; a chair topples. It is another way of suggesting the straw that breaks the camel's back.

The way these last two are painted brings us back to the ideas of Chinese and Japanese painting. They have a similar parable quality to Ch'an or Zen painting as well as its subtlety of works such as Hakuin's Candlestick (18th century Japan). With the sureness of the archer idealized in Zen, without an unnecessary mark or a distracting thought, the artists draw/ paint a simple form, allowing the viewer maximal space for thought. The Japanese master draws a candlestick, a simple practical necessity. But it is also a metaphor for Zen practice to reach one-pointedness. It is readable on either or both levels. Kcho demonstrates the same economy in his drawings, suggesting his forms with a minimum of brushwork, even creating space in a few lines to place the sculptural elements in installation context. The two artists share another important characteristic: humor. The little theater of the boulder crushing the table is tragic-comic.

To work with this iconography that has been used and overused in Cuba is a challenge that does not even distract Kcho. First, it was his iconography by dint of his birth on the Isle of Youth off the south coast of Cuba. He grew up around water even more than most Cubans do. But he takes these images, and through the strength of his skill as a draughtsman and the absence of overt sentimentality, he not only gets away with it, he honors the dead and all that die and conveys the power of the real tragedy to which these icons allude.

- Marilyn Zeitlin

Alexis Leyva Machado, Kcho: I just learned the lesson.

Excerpts from Kcho`s interview, conducted by journalist Mario Jorge Muñoz circa 2000.
(Translated from Spanish).

... At twenty years old, that big and heavy boy looked more like a basketball player than a  creator of art... Kcho... was lucky to come into the world through a muse, his mother. Martha, a cultural promoter, ready to offer help to all the genuine people on the island (Isla de la Juventud), shaped her son over the years. However, she never could imagine her big child, always smiling, with whom she listened at night to the unforgettable voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, could become an outstanding plastic artist sharing space with Wifredo Lam at the Modern Art Museum of New York and winning the Great Kwang-Ju Biennial Prize from South Korea and the UNESCO prize for arts promotion, plus an invitation in ‘99 to work at the remarkable Calder Atelier, France.

- Who is Kcho?-

This occasion calls for self-definition, to set things straight, I am, and will be Martha's son forever. This is Kcho, nothing more. She gave me life, raised me by working very hard becuase there are several brothers and sisters. She died 8 eight years ago. I've always tried to do my best to show that her huge efforts were not vain. The most important thing in my career, above all I've done is the fact of having raised my mothers name high, to revere her.

The first drawing lesson came from my mother and it changed my life when I was 13 years old. I draw today thanks to that lesson. That day I was afraid of the act of creation, but I liked it. My mother took my hand and drew what I wanted but she stopped abruptly and said: “Now, do it yourself”. The influence of my family has been total. Each element that defines my work has to do with my home. I breathed art through my entire house. Art made me realize my home was unique. School helped me to look more towards my house.

-Why do you prefer to work with discarded materials?

I like to work with old materials because they hold great energy, a huge light. I don't use garbage but past life. It has been vital for my work. Those materials have a former history. My pieces are concentrated in that energy, which also allows the use of other materials.

-Where does your work begin?-

Generally with the title. They already have title before coming into being. The first impulse is always an idea. It could be a word or a sentence. It all l starts with this.

-A Great part of your work is made by assemblages, however, you spend a lot of time drawing, why?

I like drawing for its intensity. It's like poetry. It's meditation, clear and precise idea, with not much words. It's the essence.

-Do you have special places where you create?

Any place is useful for me. It's a very strong need. I've never had a studio in Cuba and it represents knowledge for me. Because I'm always creating and I do it anywhere. In my head I can transform a little piece of paper into a studio. Now I'm used to it, I can do an installation for a museum salon with thousands of meters in just a napkin. It is all here in my head. In this sense such not having has helped me, made me strong.

- Why is migration a permanent theme in your works?

In the contemporary world, themes are dissolved and what we certainly can perceive are problematic situations. Modern life, for example, is surrounded by such different phenomena that we can hardly classify it within a unique theme. Then, each work is a different world, having in addition a different idea.
The world is made by migration. From South to North, people are traveling trying to improve their life condition. Vast human movements get greater each time and regardless of the reasons for these migrations, there's always someone close as part of this process.
For example, any Cuban family can have one of its members far away or someone who jumped into the sea trying to get to the United States.
We're all close, at home, in our neighborhood, at school, it's part of daily life. Cuban people are very friendly. All happiness and sorrow that that they experience is also part of them. Those who have left don't disappear. They can't be obviated, because they are part of our life and history. I like to have the possibility of devoting a space to those people, for this very universal topic. It's my way of shedding some light on parts of that deserving aspect of our history. Because a fair society can’t forget anyone.

- Has it been embarrassing for you to approach a topic that is so sensitive for Cubans?

My work has been attacked with horrible, superficial, and banal considerations. Some have even used it to make political speculations. Most of these opinions, -I can't call them analysis or reflections because they are not serious- come from Cuban who are not living in the country. Dark people, who quickly ask if you're Cuban from here or there. They can't understand Cubans are only from one side. Anyway I encounter these kinds of people when I was outside the island. When I did ''Regata'', many people called me counterrevolutionary, unpatriotic, antisocial... and all I did was create a work of art. Nothing more than that.
I’ve never asked for permission to create. That is why I’ve done a lot of work for which people have declared me unpatriotic or a State Security Agent. However, art critics and foreigners perceive my work in a different way. It has to do with the subject of migration, a permanent flow of people looking for job and a better way to live which is everybody’s concern. I don’t worry too much about that. The main thing for me is the way in which my work allows people to see life in a different way, its capacity to make an impression on them and, above all, make an impression on me.
I’m not a spoiler of my country’s culture. As part of its life, I will always be there. Otherwise, my art will lose sense.

-The sea, another obsession?

I’ve never understood why in Cuba, an island, the sea is considered as something dangerous, when it really is something close, so dear. The truth is, it is beautiful and dangerous at the same time, but all things defining Cuba came through the sea. The discovery of the island, Granma, The Invasion at Girón... many things are related to Cuba’s history and the sea. We forgot it is right at our doorstep. So, we have to take care of it. It’s the invisible frontier, and the only permanent fact in Cuba is that we will always be an island.
For me, the sea is something very important. I also know its value for all Cubans for the histories it holds. My goal is to help to make us think, to reflect on all those themes. Artists move ideas and it’s a great responsibility.

- Taking into account some titles of your works such as ''La Jungla'' and the series ''Kanaima', it is evident Wifredo Lam’s work has influenced you.

I made ''Trabajo de Clase'' in 1983, it was the outcome of an exercise to get engage in all level of a Plastic Arts Education. You have to select a masterwork and recreate it in a different way. It’s necessary to unearth the technique. I chose Wifredo Lam, because, a vignette of his published in Isla Magazine caught my attention many years ago. I had no idea then about how Lam did such things, so I tried to put it on paper, imitate how I think he painted. Being 13 years old, my basic tools were tempera and watercolors. I had oils because Mom gave them to me and I used linaza oil to achieve a transparency. I came to know Lam via his artwork ''Tercer Mundo''. I found it in Revolución y Cultura Magazine, which kept me informed about what was happening in the country. Besides, my mother was a big admirer of his work. As time passed, Lam became more familiar to me , his artwork was everywhere. However, at school they taught me that he was one more luminary among other Cuban painters, without assessing his real value. To me, Lam and his ''Jungla'' showed me the grandiosity of the Museum of Modern Artin New York (MoMA).

In January of 1996, the museum already had my work, when I had the opportunity to visit it. I went to see his work. What I like most is the fact I’m hanging there with him. ''La Jungla'' (2001) is the outcome of that knowledge and admiration for Lam. In any museum that I have exhibited in, he was already there. Some time ago, I went to the Museum of Israel and I right away asked for Lam’s collection. He was there, I found it the following day. It’s pretty. ''Canaima'' is the title of a series of small canvas and paper Lam made there when he traveled to Venezuela, where there’s a National Park with his name. He painted bears with thorns and fangs. The titles was inspirational for me in creating a group of works that I call dangerous objects. I kept the name of "Kanaima'' with ‘K’, as a reference to Lam. ''Los peligros del Olvido'' (assemblage), has also to do with Lam's glance, always interested in delving deeper into our people’s culture. While the great masters of European culture were still looking at the rest of the world through Colonial eyes, Lam saw that flood of cultures mixing as part of natural history, his own life. He worked with masks. My mother liked them very much.

Some time ago, in Sao Paulo, I made contact with a Belgian collector who was auctioning his mask collection and I bought it, they are very good. What I’m trying to express is that it’s impossible to forget our culture, our roots. It’s to make sure we do not disregard what we are, to understand the importance of our native land. It’s impossible to forget Lam, he opened the doors of Cuban Art to the world, keeping them opened, making it easier to exhibit our culture. He was a great painter, one of the greatest of this continent, gaining the respect of other luminaries, Picasso, Bretón... It made possible our respect around the entire world. This is the door through which I entered with other Cuban artists. ''La Jungla'' and ''Kanaima'' series, were things I was planning a long time ago to honor Lam, as a sort of act of gratitude for his undeniable role in promoting Cuban culture around the entire world. He is a light over the island.

- Many assemblages, made with old materials could be damaged. Aren’t you afraid of so-called artwork longevity?

I believe the work’s durability is determined by the idea. I’m not God. I won’t live a thousand years. I’m an ordinary human being interested in doing things as best as I can. If there’s a real final judgment, they will analyze whether you were good person, what did you did for other people, whether you took advantage of your talent or not. The most important thing is the place you have in people’s heart. The public places you in heaven or hell.

- What do you do in your leisure time?

When I’m not creating I just fall in love with everything. I spend a lot of time with my friends, with people I love and who love me. It’s also creation. Creating is also love. I also love fishing, movies and music, Jazz above all.

- You managed to succeed in a very competitive world, ruled by market laws. What are the reasons for such success?

I don’t have secrets: I’m a son of a successful land. This country is great due to their sons. It’s a leading country for very beautiful things. It has many things to do yet. For example, Cuba is full of goodness. This is a proper characterization of this country, because the entire world is lacking goodness. And I didn’t invent all this. I just learned the lesson.


Taken from El Caimán Barbudo

The New York Times
April 5, 1996

Art in Review

By Michael Kimmelman

Kcho Barbara Gladstone Gallery 99 Greene Street, near Spring Street SoHo Through April 20

Kcho (pronounced KAH-tcho and originally Alexis Leyva Machado) is 26, Cuban, an artist who's created a buzz lately. His New York debut is a mixed bag and not easy to make out. His main motif is the boat, and his best works are bentwood towers of them. Open-form constructions joined by shiny C-clamps, they're playful like Erector Sets but elegant like Alvar Aalto chairs, and the clamps add a sense of latent tension, as if, were one of them undone, the whole thing might burst at the seams. They're dreamy, ad hoc, slightly surreal concoctions that could just keep going up and up, a la Brancusi's "Endless Column."

Cuba's an island, and boats are how people get off it, so they also connote escape, freedom. Other Cuban-born artists, like Jose Bedia, exploit the motif to this end. Besides the bentwood towers, Kcho has drawn boats made of baseballs and hot dogs (allusions to Uncle Sam?) and constructed, out of paperbacks of Marxist tracts, a boat whose lack of seaworthiness may imply something about the sinking prospects of Fidel Castro's regime.

The drawings and paperback boat aren't nearly as fanciful as the bentwood sculptures, and since Kcho is Cuba's government-approved artist, as it were, you may also wonder just what kind of political message they intend, if that's even what they do intend.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Kcho: “Only when I’m working do I understand what I think.”
by Reynaldo Lugo, Pictures: Eduardo Cabrera

Alexis Leyva Machado who signs his works Kcho and has attained in a few years a privileged position in modern art inside and outside Cuba...

2/24/04,  

He signs himself Kcho, but his name is Alexis Leyva Machado. His artistic name has the advantage of possible interpretation as a piece of something; undoutedly the sea.

Moreover, Kcho is a man of clear ideas. He knows what he’s doing, what he wants and how to defend what he does and wants. We talked for more than an hour and, during the conversation, he had to give me the necessary arguments for carefully selecting the most important phrase in that interview: "Only when I’m working do I understand what I think." I would dare to correct that by saying that Kcho only paints because he thinks.

For him, painting doesn’t exist. "The last time I painted I was sixteen years old," he told me. His world is that of installations and drawings that help him conceive them and even the drawings of his own three-dimensional works. He’s fanatic about volume and has managed to see that his audience relates very well to his spaces. And although he doesn’t say so, also to his great theme: insularity and its symbols. Kcho isn’t interested in returning time and again to the boats and houses of fishing villages. He cosiders them recurrent images and not themes. With those elements he has constructed a good part of his career.This is to be expected of a youth who was born in a part of Cuba known as Isle of Pines and spent most of his childhood on a ferry.

Apparently the public matters to Kcho. And that means thinking. He estimates that, day by day, he has been preparing himself for the type of work he is doing. The chacterisics and evolution of plastic arts in recent decades have facilitated that. In fact, although Kcho’s works can be found anywhere – literally anywhere – he is very well represented in many world museums, among them the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

I could say that Kcho is the best-known and recognized Cuban artist in the world but I won’t. I prefer to conclude with a statistical fact that perhaps explains the pint of view that I dared to rectify earlier: in the last eight years, Kcho has held thirty-eight personal exhibits and ahundred collective exhibits in thirty-one countries. That’s enough so that his thoughts are understandable just through his works Working the way he works assumes that outside the work shop he doesn’t even have time to think.

Sol y Son Magazine

News & Views

Kcho he who makes the Island, does the trick
Author: Amalina Bomnín

ArtNexus No. 53 - Jul 2004

Although it is true that the twice-Islander is interested in dealing with the phenomenon of migration to the island, it should be noted that this interest is equally motivated by a situation that exceeds the boundaries of the local. Thus, the range of his proposal is not circumscribed to the Cuban context but is open to the world and is one of its most central contemporary problems.


For Alexis Leyva Machado (Kcho), the island is a concept in flux, one that is enriched by daily events. This idea is expressed in his work, which transforms various objects or implements of daily life into the map of Cuba, or into an icon that represents the nation. By diversification, Kcho enriches the meanings of “insularity” through art, and at the same time consolidates a transitory territory, of mandatory reference. Kcho seems to lay a kind of trap for the viewer, and his work suggests that, even if we move, we always need to return to the Island, be it through travel or through memory, because it is a place of encounter and convergence.
If Wifredo Lam was a Cuban artist whose prominent contributions in the 1940s focused the Euro-centric gaze on Third World art, today Kcho is the singular figure who, by establishing a contemporary discourse based on the popular, is an integral part of the transgressive strategies that situate the “subaltern” in synchrony with the “center.” In his case, however, since he has made his way in New York at only twenty years of age, we can completely write off a possible subtle manipulation of the marketplace “to make more sophisticated instruments of domination over the Other,”1 because at only 25 years of age, he built his way up in New York. A member of the style known as New Cuban Art, which emerged in the 1980s, and without a degree from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Kcho is a young artist who rapidly and very efficiently has gained access to international circuits of art through a poetics of precariousness. Kcho was born in Nueva Gerona, Juventud Island, in 1970. There, in his hometown, under the influence of the family’s artisan tradition (his father is a carpenter and his mother a potter, and they occasionally weave using vegetable fibers), he attended the Escuela Elemental de Arte. Those are the roots of his interest in working with the materials of poverty, learned in his own environment, where he grew in harmony with nature. In 1984 Kcho was admitted to the Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA) in Havana, and in 1986, in Nueva Gerona, he presented his first primarily pictorial individual show, “Fabelas.” He finished his studies with a thesis that used the nation’s symbols in relation to the Cuban landscape, the latter interpreted as a center of national values. In the same work he acknowledged Juan Francisco Elso as an “antecedent source,” and Robert Smithson, Renier Ruthenbeck, Mario Merz, Carl Andre, and Walter de Maria as artists who were close to his concept of unity with nature.
La bandera (The Flag) or Ésta es mi tierra (This is my Land 1990), and Escudo (Seal) or Paisaje cubano (Cuban Landscape, 1989)–1990, were included in that graduation show in 1990, and in effect they anticipated Juan Francisco Elso’s influence on Kcho’s later works. The first piece was built with guásima wood, branches, dried herbs, palm, red and black earth, and white clay, in which the artist grew rosemary and other herbs. This process brings him close to contemporary actions that attempt to dissolve the borders between art and life, and it alluded to an identification with continued construction that changes with time. The second piece was made with flamboyant banyan tree branches, leaves, royal palm spokes, iron, thread, old pieces of cloth, and wax. Both works are a kind of “insignia of the poor,” but have been dignified by Kcho by paying attention to their autochthonous, nonindustrial quality. Kcho also “charged” his works à la Elso, so that his closeness to this artist, who died of cancer when he was at the peak of his career, went beyond the formal level.
Already in those days Kcho’s inclination for sculpture and three-dimensional works, based initially on drawing, was noticeable; and he was always attached to “impoverished” materials, materials that are discarded, organic, of a mutable and ephemeral nature. Since his debut he also showed little interest in color and a rejection of formal stereotypes that could link him to an exotic view of his environment. Nevertheless, to a degree Kcho can be seen as a curious case: he is a mulatto from the interior, one who expresses himself in street slang and an almost indecipherable accent; he uses a nickname taken from the pet name his parents gave him as a child; and at the same time he has a “cultured” sensibility and a clear awareness of how to “make” a difference without historical or cultural impositions. His trajectory coincides with that of many great artists: rejected early on, then acclaimed, soon pampered. In the beginning he was not understood, his works were not admitted to the landscape salons, and he was not admitted into the ISA. His pieces of that time, built with natural or discarded materials, spoke of the environment but not in a superficial way, and instead internalized our identity on the basis of the popular and vernacular, assuming precariousness of a different life perspective. His land art and earth art were close references to his concept of unity with nature.
In 1991, Kcho inaugurated his third individual show at Centro de Arte 23 y 12, under the title “Paisaje popular cubano” (Popular Cuban Landscape, coinciding with the Fourth Havana Biennial), and it was a success. The rough catalogue of kraft paper, bound with strips of blue, red, and white cloth in allusion to the Cuban flag, already spoke of the singularity of his proposal. Gerardo Mosquera’s presentation christened Kcho as “the rustic of new Cuban art.” Nevertheless, Kcho has felt the reference to such epigonism excessive. That show revealed the artist’s potential, with its level of synthesis and its conceptual eloquence. In indication of the artisanal, Kcho established various widely used tools to symbolize Cuban-ness on the basis of the materials, and by the fact that each of them formed a map of the island. Plan jaba (The Jaba Plan), Mi jaula (My Jail), and El papalote (The Kite), were three of the pieces on exhibit.
Cómo el garabato se parece a Cuba (How the Garabato Looks Like Cuba), shown in 1992 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, reproduced Cuba’s geographic image with particular simplicity: a tree branch, which in turn became a practical, useful object —a garabato, used to hold the underbrush to be cut by a machete. Also in this show was a tree-branch ladder, with machetes for steps and crowned by a crest made of palm (the national tree). It was one of Kcho’s most discussed works, thanks to its ambivalence and irony: a commentary on the nonsense of thinking of Cuba as a place easily accessible by its enemies (the machete was the weapon of choice during the wars of independence). The artist conceived each of the works exhibited with purely vegetable elements, strips of old cloth, ropes, and even mud, including the national Seal, which today belongs to the museum’s permanent collection.
With his show at Centro de Arte 23 y 12, public and critics began to pay attention to Kcho. Following the show at the museum, his modus operandi acquired the particular seal that characterizes him to this day. He has become one of the first young artists to participate in group shows held abroad, despite not having a degree from ISA. His idea of sculpture, which disregards the expressive medium’s ontological condition, turned his pieces into a non-still life where the human hand barely intervenes. For him, materials are not “dominated,” but allowed to evoke meaning from their very physical-ness, whether natural or recycled. With them Kcho offers a message of socio-cultural connotations, but his greatest merit is the fact that he speaks of Cuban-ness through traditional elements and symbols that have been transformed into stereotypes by indiscriminate use; he charges them with energy and organic life and gives them back their original value. On the other hand, his conception of space, for which he claims to have Lucio Fontana as a referent, has helped “un-stuff” the traditionally lethargic genre of sculpture in Cuba. His hanging sculptures, or those that can be entirely apprehended from a single angle, are unique in the history of Cuban art in their level of synthesis and, in some cases, of transparency.
Although Kcho has been “careful,” his style (in the sense of his personality) proved subtle in the face of the contextual pressures. This was evident in his approach to the topics of migration and utopia in A los ojos de la historia, (To the eyes of history, 1992) after his trips abroad, where he was able to consolidate the empathy he had established with the work of Duchamp, Picasso, Brancusi, and Tatlin, and later in La regata, shown at the 5th Havana Biennial in 1994. The former was inspired by Tatlin’s Model for the 3rd International Tower, and subverted the idea of the original work into an object of symbolic functionality. A spiral tower similar to that of the Russian avant-garde artist, but of firewood and sticks and crowned by a coffee strainer, constitutes a tribute to utopia from the so-called Third World. With this piece, the avant-garde’s humanistic and transgressive impulses find a favorable terrain for development (at the intellectual level) despite adversities. Kcho hoped to transform setback into victory. In La regata, a heart-rending metaphor about the massive exodus of Cubans to Miami, he used all kinds of discarded or recycled materials to suggest a makeshift, vulnerable vessel: tires, shoes, old wood, etc. The piece commented on the state of emergency and the drama of events that caused—and continue to cause—such great loss of human life. It was to be the preamble to a whole series of explorations of the phenomenon of migration. Having been born on an island which in turn is part of a larger island nation has acquainted the artist, since childhood, with the experience of traveling; his knowledge possesses a lived quality. When fame was not even a distant dream, traveling was not pleasurable for him, but something that provoked feelings of loss and nostalgia. With La regata, Kcho left land art and earth art behind and began to move towards arte povera in his use of ephemeral or discarded materials as plastic resources to evoke the imminence, the drama, the peremptory condition of the event. He preferred installation to hanging on walls. The tenacity and latency of his narratives prescribe a spatial dynamic in constant flux.
Also in 1994, the artist was invited to participate in “Cocido y crudo” (Cooked and roar), at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid. For the occasion he created Lo mejor del verano (The Best Thing About Summer), an installation that surprised viewers with the poetic way in which it dealt with the topic of migration. Visually, it is a beautiful piece, with its boats, oars, sticks, kayaks, baskets, and fishing nets suspended from the ceiling and reflected in the waxed, black floor. It was as if viewers found themselves submerged under the sea alongside these vessels and tools, and at the same time “carried” them on top of their heads, thus becoming both actors and spectators in a possible shipwreck.
The topic of migration, seen from the perspective of a debate between permanence and exile as a generator of personal and collective anxieties, was again presented in El camino de la nostalgia (The Road of Longing), which denoted a subject particularly touching for the artist. A makeshift pier, with tires hanging as symbols of travel, was a tribute to all those who, for one reason or another, seek the journey as a solution to their problems. The pier was also a mediating moment between loss and the possibility of return, because “. . . it is exiles that abound, those who live submerged in a productive no-man’s land.”2
One of Kcho’s most salient characteristics is his intuition. The execution of his pieces is developed through drawing, and Kcho’s drawings reveal a natural talent and at the same time cunning thought, as indicated by his titles that contribute content to the work. The artist explains that the title of each piece is the first thing to emerge. His academic background has allowed him to pick and choose from the history of art the best-suited keys in his filiation to sculpture and volume, always with an emphasis on a search for the essence. This is for the case of La columna infinita (The Endless Column, 1995) shown at the Reina Sofía’s Crystal Palace in 2000, in which the artist deploys a column of tires supported by a rope on one occasion and later varies the elements while maintaining the ceiling-high vertical framework. This piece, which began a series of the same title, was based on Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column—the Romanian artist created “Modernity’s most spiritual shapes”3—and seeks an archetype; thus its simplicity, purity, and sobriety.
The recognition of Kcho’s art transcended national boundaries when, in February 1995, in Paris, he received the UNESCO award for the promotion of the arts for the whole body of his work. In September of that same year his Para olvidar (To Forget), was awarded First Prize at the Kwang-Ju Biennale, in South Korea. In that work he placed a boat with oars atop a sea of empty and half-filled beer bottles, a commentary on the pain and anguish the journey causes those who risk it all only to find themselves living off memories and homesickness for what was left behind. In 1996 the Barbara Gladstone Gallery of New York exhibited Kcho’s work successfully for the first time in the United States. The next year his pieces were seen at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), in the show “Todo cambia” (Everything Changes) which comprised two installations. It was again Kcho commenting on social conditions in Cuba through the image of a boat that can be explored, this time structured with bookshelves of the kind used by street peddlers. Texts in Spanish, English, and French announced the climate of intellectual openness in the country at that time. Instead of migrating, artists were able to travel abroad, earning dollars to bring back and spend in a Cuba whose economy was partially “dollarized” in order to survive.
The show’s second installation was a series of totemic sculptures in raw clay, a kayak with oar, wire structures carved in the shape of a boat, and a sailboat. These elements arranged in the form of a stage, are a metaphor of the permanent imminence of the journey for a certain type of people without access to the dollars they crave. What, then, is the artist trying to tell us with “Todo cambia” if its scenes repeat ad infinitum the concept of the journey? The paradox of his text illuminated the controversial topic of the Cuban diaspora, since while some do not feel the need to migrate, for other migration is the only solution.
Although it is true that the twice-Islander is interested in dealing with the phenomenon of migration to the island, it should be noted that this interest is equally motivated by a situation that exceeds the boundaries of the local. Thus, the range of his proposal is not circumscribed to the Cuban context but is open to the world and is one of its most central contemporary problems. This, added to the aura of his materials, which redeem an “aesthetics of poverty” that uses mainstream languages to place “high” and “low” on an equal plane, fine-tunes his discourse as part of the hottest cultural debates about the place of third world art in the global scene.
After 1997, Kcho didn’t exhibit again in Cuba until 2000, when he did so invited by Casa de las Américas. No me agradezcan el silencio (Don’t thank Me for the Silence) was the title of that show, a reference to his absence from the Cuban scene and at the same time to a probable forgetting of the conditions in his country. One of the show’s most interesting pieces was a boat built with pellet fencing that almost entirely covered the gallery. The prow pushed through a narrow door into another room and allowed the public to board the piece, an eloquent image of the massive character migration can acquire.
Kcho’s incursions in drawing and printmaking have made clear his versatility and his prolific imagination while maintaining the motifs of his prior work. The show “25 piedras,” presented at the Taller Experimental de Gráfica on the occasion of the Encuentro de Grabado 2001, comprised lithographs and reveals the sobriety, synthesis, and impact of someone capable of creating art out of anything. Recurrent topics here are the sea, boats, waves, and oars, all executed with quick and unencumbered strokes that produce concise, limpid, and austere images of great visual efficacy.
Referring once again to Brancusi, Kcho introduced the notion of flight into his discourse, using bird wings, propellers, winglets, and satellites, to hark back to Brancusi’s Bird in Space, with which the Romanian artist “sought not so much to represent the image of a bird as to materialize the act of flying, concretizing a dynamic impression by giving it an essential shape.”4 This series he titled Módulo libertad. The resource of flight in his most recent pieces signifies an alternative in the framework of his own stories, marked as they are by the drama of life: they incarnate the desire for ascent and transcendence, for overcoming the human condition, the equivalent of happiness. In one way or another, Kcho brings movement to his pieces, caring not as much for formal aesthetics as for the ability to evoke emotions and readings from the message’s intrinsic force, thus eluding materiality. In another series, titled No juego (I Won’t Play), and comprising objects and drawings on paper and cloth, we also saw rocking chairs, columns, and stilts as signs of motion that do not necessarily imply spatial displacement.
The element of quotation has been a constant in Kcho’s poetics. The artist has recreated, in varying versions, paradigmatic works by Brancusi, Tatlin, and recently, Lam. Lam’s La jungla was an inspiration for Kcho’s most recent exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, in November 2001, which combined the unidirectional nature of the rationalist ideal of progress as prefigured in the spiral of the Model for the 3rd International, with the diversified precariousness of the Caribbean context.
Kcho devoted one gallery to drawings, which have always made evident the genre’s expansive potential by rejecting conventions; they appear as sketches, projects, and works in progress that are uninterested in preliminaries. The recklessness, fluidity, and the level of synthesis in Kcho’s drawings—executed in medium and large formats with graffiti in ink, liquid wax, and saliva on paper—make utopia, through the repetition of an archetype (the spiral), a common element; he has repositioned it in a new context to liberate it from the impulse towards industrial development and assumes it as an incomplete project, one that is subject to changes even within its limitations.
In another gallery the artist arranged a jungle of towers, truncated spirals of various dimensions, some crowned by a coffee sifter, which leaves little room for the viewer and establishes analogies with Lam’s exuberant symbolic and structural plotting. This is a landscape in crescendo of fragile appearance but not easily accessed, given its “thorny” nature. On the other hand, the linearity of Modernist progress as posed by Tatlin’s vertical tower is subverted in this version and transformed into a horizontal profusion, thus facilitating alternatives, the possibility of choosing variants according to contemporary social conditions in the Cuban context.
Some have criticized Kcho’s art for being repetitive in recent years, since for a long time he has been dealing with the same issues (migration, utopia, identity, etc.) from a similar questioning perspective. In his case, as in the case of other Cuban artists who have achieved a privileged personal and artistic status, this is worrisome since it reveals a change in the level of problematization of the statements. Kcho may be risking being absorbed by the market as an artist who comments on crucial Cuban problems, and for the way in which he projects such issues, from his discourse of “the ephemeral.”
In his recent interventions, Kcho’s objects have appeared transformed. Now they are not only precarious but also menacing. Still motivated by the urgency of migration in his context, he refuses to abandon the topic, and during 2000 he started the series Objetos peligrosos (Dangerous Objects), comprised of objects and drawings in paper and cloth. As a novel element, he uses here needlefish quills, “war trophies” taken by fishermen in their struggle against these animals. Kcho’s quills puncture boats, kayaks, and a plastic sheet imitating a rug, a comment on the dangers involved in the adventure of traveling. The protagonist role assigned to these aggressive visual codes reveals the ascendancy of the migratory tragedy. In conversation, the artist continually alludes to the fact that nowadays everybody migrates, as if dismissing the importance of the Cuban phenomenon. The piece that gives the series its title was shown at the 8th Havana Biennial, where the artist currently lives.
Kcho considers himself a fisherman. He often takes to the sea in this capacity and his hobby puts him in the position of finding a variety of discarded objects to be incorporated into his work. Once in Cojimar he picked up two old sheds of the kind used by fishermen to keep their personal implements and the fruits of their labor, or to even live, and he penetrated them with needlefish quills. Upon seeing this piece, many have made ecological associations, but in truth it constitutes an allegory of the tensions that can arise in interpersonal relations. The disposition of the quills in the shed’s front and back responds to the nature of friction among people: some are open, some are backhanded and treasonous. He tells me also that he’s felt aggression many times in his life, in the most varied of ways: his house, his professional life, his desires have been spied upon, and that is why he wanted to stage conflicts without making them appear violent. For Kcho, friendship is a talisman, which gives La venganza del pez its poetic character.
Traveling is something the artist does because he has no choice, but it doesn’t satisfy him. That is why there is always a counterpart—remaining at home—when he deals with the topic. Archipiélago, a series started in 2003, alludes to the inevitable journey. A map of Cuba consisting of a flotilla of small boats and three propellers defining Yucatán, Florida, and Hispaniola has been deployed on a large area. The boats, covered by constructions (houses, lighthouses, lampposts, etc.,) refer us to the contingency of navigation, to the constant flow of communications interconnecting the world and without which we would not survive. However, home is a constant in this story: without it, movement is inconceivable. This piece is a synthesis of two important moments in the artist’s career: the favelas and La regata, and Kcho has created several versions of it. A section of the series was exhibited in Maracaibo, Venezuela, earlier this year.
Kcho’s latest piece is an environment comprising an entire house arranged on top of oars. The house has been installed, primarily, with furniture and utensils brought from the artist’s own home in Juventud Island. Friends, relatives, and acquaintances contributed to the installation. The title is Núcleos del tiempo (Time Nuclei) and its rooms are all at the same level so that we can move underneath it without difficulty. Precariousness here continues to be a constant, and the fact that in Cuba it is common for several generations to live under the same roof, given the difficult economic conditions, is also emphasized. Although each of these spaces has a special affective charge for Kcho, the idea he is trying to communicate is not that this is his own home (it can be anybody’s), not that he is a homebody, but that these small sites give us safety, calm, and warmth; they are the places where we are most ourselves, but we nonetheless often have to abandon them against our will.
Kcho has not shown his work in a gallery since 2002, but he has used the time to explore his formal repertoire, and the gains are clear. Undoubtedly, his discourse has led the way in Cuban art, especially in terms of the renewal of concepts in sculpture and the use of materials. The fertile tropologization he has achieved on the basis of the island alerts us to our individual and collective responsibility in the face of challenges imposed by a world more and more fragile, thanks to the human condition itself.


Notes
1. Gerardo Mosquera, “Robando del pastel global. Globalización, diferencia y apropiación cultural,” Horizontes del arte latinoamericano (Madrid: Ed. Tecnos, S. A., 1999), pp. 57–67.
2. Estrella de Diego, “Soy Ulises, hijo de Alertes,”, La columna infinita, exhibition catalogue Crystal Palace, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, February 8–May 7, 2000, (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2000), pp. 37–52.
3. Constantin Brancusi, (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, S. A.), p. 2.
4. Ibid., p. 4.
 

The Daily Texan
Volume 101, No. 88
Tuesday, February 6, 2001

The art of politics

Kcho shows paintings at Gallery 106

By Jennifer Joy
Daily Texan Staff

Gallery 106 spices up Austin with a little Cuban flavor. Alexis Machado Leyva, internationally known as Kcho, is exhibiting works on paper and canvas for the first time in Austin. He was expected to arrive this past week but was not able to obtain a visa. Fortunately, his politically charged works have a voice of their own.

Born and raised on a small island off the Southern coast of Cuba, the sea played an enormous role in shaping Kcho's personality. As a result of a Communist society and a faltering economy, Kcho has been witness to mass migration out of Cuba. Recognized around the world for his site-specific installations, he established a vocabulary of specific imagery related to resettlement, such as canoes, kayaks and oars.

Government censorship has forced artists like Kcho to incorporate symbolism as a means of self-expression and political commentary. A towering diptych of a boat and a pair of oars represents world violence. Bullets have pierced the oars and upright boat, both intended to personify human beings.

Kcho's eloquent use of a monochromatic palette, red in this case, eliminates any aesthetic distractions and reinforces a pertinent message of death and water. Kcho chooses to minimize the surrounding environments, but creates dilineated space with simplified line and watery shadows. He prefers to work directly on the paper with ink or crayon, and he sometimes applies the medium with his bare hands.

As an artist, Kcho was exposed to the works of Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi, sculptor of the Endless Column. Recently, Kcho spent a year in Paris visiting the studio of Alexander Calder. Inspired by Calder's mobiles, Kcho's series, Sin Titulo, statically balances propellers and canoes from long reeds. Here, Kcho's minimalist use of line ironically creates a complicated spatial arrangement between the wall or floor and the suspended mobile.

The execution and process Kcho performs for each piece of art is as beautiful as the finished product. Sergio Lopez, a longtime friend shed some light on the artist's unique process at the opening reception Feb. 4.

"First, he imagines the object, not the drawing. The idea comes first; the idea is the object, then he puts them into drawing," Lopez said.

Kcho's work is exhibited worldwide, and his intimate exhibition provides Austin with direct access to the most influential artistic voice in Latin America.

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