Still from Touch (video, 2002), by Janine Antoni, included in the exhibition Into the Mix

Twenty-two months later, the CRB is back. Our November 2013 issue, published today, includes reviews of recent books of poems by Edward Baugh, Loretta Collins Klobah, and Sasenarine Persaud; recent fiction by Merle Collins and Keith Jardim; as well as a critical study of the late John Hearne by his daughter Shivaun; a collection of the little-known later writings of Eric Walrond; and a study of “Caribbean–US crosscurrents in literature and culture.” You’ll also find two new poems by Trinidadian writer Shivanee Ramlochan; a review of the recent film The Stuart Hall Project (directed by John Akomfrah); and your Antilles blogger’s own notes on a 2012 exhibition that raised questions about the geographical balancing acts required of artists from certain parts of the world.

There’s a lagniappe to look forward to: later this month we’ll publish a long interview with writer Oonya Kempadoo, talking about her new book, All Decent Animals; and an “Also noted” column rounding up the most significant books we missed during the CRB’s 2012–2013 hiatus.

And keep an eye on Antilles in the coming weeks, where we plan to run a new series of blog posts called “Footnotes”, giving further information on books reviewed in the current issue of the CRB.

Happy reading!

Detail of I Am Not Afraid to Fight a Perfect Stranger, by John Cox (2009, acrylic on canvas). Image courtesy Nadia Huggins

Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions, an exhibition of contemporary Caribbean art, curated by Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores, opened on 21 January, 2011, at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, and runs until 10 March. It includes work by thirty-six artists from twelve Caribbean countries and the international diaspora.

In his catalogue essay, Cozier writes:

I got the idea for the name of this exhibition while looking at a series of images by John Cox, with titles such as I Am Not Afraid to Fight a Perfect Stranger. We see the artist rendering himself in training, at the starting block, as a runner, as a boxer or sometimes as a wrestler. He presents himself, in various combative postures and sequences, as a contender, but with an image of himself. This entanglement or engagement of the other-self, a shadow or mirror image, is an ongoing story. Will these selves ever merge and find cohesion, or will one be split asunder in the search for “true” self-consciousness and awareness? The Caribbean artist is always in competition with a long history of expedient labelling of their world and their very selves — externally and also internally.

You can download the exhibition’s e-catalogue here, and a review of Wrestling with the Image will appear in the CRB in the coming weeks.

Gallery visitor looking at Cape Town, by Sheena Rose (2010, digital video). Image courtesy Nadia Huggins

Detail of Fragment Kbi Wi Kani, by Marcel Pinas (2007, bottles and cloth). Image courtesy Nadia Huggins

Cover of the first issue of ARC; image courtesy the publishers

Creative work can’t thrive in isolation. Every artist, writer, musician, performer, or filmmaker needs contact with creative peers, a creative tradition, and an attentive audience, but also access to a critical space, a forum for sharing and discussing ideas. To put it more simply, an artist needs not only working time and the tools of her craft, but venues in which her work can be encountered, documented, and evaluated: galleries and museums, catalogues and magazines. For Caribbean visual artists, the latter are in short supply. In the Anglophone Caribbean particularly, visual art publications produced to international standards are rare.

ARC is a bold and brave intervention into this circumstance. Published by two young artists from St Vincent and the Grenadines, ARC defines itself as “a Caribbean art and culture magazine dedicated to highlighting emerging and established artists.” Holly Bynoe, ARC’s editor in chief, and Nadia Huggins, the magazine’s creative director, both work in the medium of photography. ARC is an ambitious extension of their creative practice, and a decisive engagement with the work of their contemporaries in the Caribbean and its diasporas.

The magazine’s website went live this week, and the first quarterly print edition of ARC will be launched later this month (find out how you can get a copy here). It features work by the Jamaican photographer Radcliffe Roye, the British filmmaker (with St Lucian roots) Isaac Julien, and the young Barbadian Sheena Rose, among other artists. Via email, Bynoe and Huggins answered a few questions about the project’s inspiration and intent.

Nicholas Laughlin: ARC is an acronym (“Art. Recognition. Culture”), but it also suggests, among other things, the geographical arc of the Antilles and the sense of a creative trajectory. What else?

Holly Bynoe: ARC, to me, informs and starts to discuss a projected motion — up, out, and beyond — into a space and a place of curiosity, where some things are defined and structured, and others are akin to the human condition — i.e., existing in an unsure and ambiguous space. ARC attempts to record and take stock of the individual processes that allow for creativity.

It is a play off the archipelago; one of the first shapes embedded in our collective unconscious, and the shape of the “first recorded boat” and the last boat my father worked on. In many ways, the word and its shift are deeply personal and related to my history. I think it is funny that the two mirror each other, especially when we consider the waters, boundaries, and motions of people across the region, and the way we have come to know each other through our similar experiences informed by this movement — their geographic dispersal and how this shape in many ways references a starting point, but never a final destination. And the lack of a destination or a defined position when considering a container or a contained space for art brings up wild ideas about form, structure, directions, and narratives.

Nadia Huggins: I really wanted a name that could roll off the tongue easily. A word that would be indelible in people’s minds. I’ve had a few people refer to it as “The Ark.” I find this really interesting, given the sort of history we come from. I love the way people make their own connections with the word: Arc, Arch, Ark, Art. The play on the archipelago is a really important aspect — I feel as though we are running a common thread through all of the islands and pulling each other closer.

From a visual standpoint, I wanted the name to have impact. The first element to a successful masthead is your name. Once the name functions in speech, it can then be translated into design and have varying effects. The letters function very symmetrically; there is something about a connection between the letters, each flowing seamlessly into the others, the same way a curve functions. Regarding the acronym, the letter R is the most important, because I wanted to give young artists the opportunity to be recognised for their work. If you dissect the logo, the R has a unique personality to it, whereas the other letters stand at an end. It is about creating that connection.

NL: What was the spark of inspiration or provocation that made you decide to start the magazine, and how does it fit into the continuum of your respective creative practices?

HB: Nadia and I have been discussing the possibility of working on something of ours for a long time. With our backgrounds in photography and our versatile growth over the past three years, it seemed a ripe time to consider it. I turned thirty, finished my MFA, and lost my father in the space of a week. I think when you go through such drastic shifts and change, you come out of it understanding what risks are, and above all what is important. It was time for me to figure out how I was going to fulfill that urge to create and be a part of something that would have a collective and necessary impact on my social space and geography.

I have an intensive photographic background, and I have been thinking about images — their culture, format, composition, history, and their interaction within spaces, be they formal, dictated, or arbitrary — for a good part of seven years, the last three with a strict academic focus. Being involved in a project like ARC forces me to first engage myself with dialogues and mediums that begin as being peripheral, only to realise that we all share a common “language” and code when we create. I have been looking at the work coming out of the region, and I think it can only benefit my personal practice.

I am interested in opening a space and discussion about how contemporary photographic practices are changing in the region. I want to find artists who are involving themselves in a global dialogue while remaining true to the dynamism and context of their lived experience.

NH: Honestly, I was feeling stifled with the commercial work I was creating. I felt as though I didn’t have an outlet to do the things I enjoyed most. I wanted a design project to explore type and images and to pour all of my meticulousness into — hence ARC. I also really love sharing information and ideas with people. I don’t think there is enough exposure given to what is going on around the region. I spend a lot of time on the Internet exploring and exposing myself to as much as possible. It has opened up my mind immensely.

I never had the opportunity to expand my horizons by going to college or travelling, so the Internet has always been my teacher. I think there are a lot of artists out there without this opportunity as well, who aren’t sure where to find the right kind of information to help them grow. Artists want to know what other artists in the region are doing. They want to explore and compare each other’s process and outcome. I wanted to create a central space for them to explore other people’s creations, ideas, and struggles. Exposure is crucial to growth.

Spread from the first issue of ARC, featuring photography by Radcliffe Roye; image courtesy the publishers

NL: What are ARC’s defining characteristics, and how do you imagine it fitting into the wider context of critical attention to visual art in the Caribbean?

HB: I see ARC as a playground, a space for experimentation and the unlikely. Our definition will ring through by the fact that we pay a great deal of attention to our artists and writers, their individual concerns and thoughts about reproduction, structure, and presentation of work. We don’t presume that ARC will fill a space in every artist’s household, but we want it to become a part of the way people come to understand how creativity is no longer a contained or static force. Everything is affected by it, from the way we communicate to the way we expose and represent ourselves to each other; one look at Facebook and you can see the way photography has changed how we understand the world around us. It is now a ubiquitous medium.

I also want ARC to enforce the fact that the artist is no longer a strictly autonomous or insular being. I want to have ARC interact with the culture of individuals and have them come to understand why it is important to start having a discourse set up around supporting and harnessing the potential of art. I don’t see its space as solely critical. While I think it is important to have fully fleshed out studies and explorations, I also think the way we are going to separate ourselves is to treat its presentation like an art piece, keeping in mind the way we all subjectively interpret and come to understand ideas, concepts, and visuals that relate, contradict, or support each other.

We are hoping to engage and enable the current generation of emerging artists who are formulating new ways of presenting themselves. Most of them are unsure about what they are creating and are working with process, spontaneity, and modernity in a visceral and reactive way. There are a lot of risks being taken now, and we want to explore how seasoned artists are in discourse with the emerging creators.

NH: When I first envisioned the magazine, I felt we had to ensure the design was clean, classic, and sleek. What we’ve done with the design isn’t unique, but I think it meets a certain standard in the way art magazines are done. I dislike publications where you feel as though you are being bombarded with information and you are unable to absorb what is necessary. There’s already a circus going on in an artist’s head, why overwhelm them with more clutter? I think there needs to be a rhythm and space to breathe when browsing pages. There is a reason why you go into a gallery and there are white walls — this is so you can focus on the central elements in the space. In our case it’s the text and images. That was one of the most important factors to me, creating and maintaining a particular aesthetic.

Also, I envision ARC as a place to exchange ideas. One of the most important things is to have that interaction; we want people to give feedback on the work that is being presented and share their ideas and frustrations too.

We also want to use the space to educate artists, which is why we are incorporating tutorials and tips on different processes, especially of how to move forward in promoting and cataloguing their work. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of the Internet, and they don’t have a handle on how it works and how it can improve your craft. That is why a lot of places like deviantART and Behance succeed in helping artists — there is a lot of interaction between the artists and their peers. I think this is crucial in moving forward. Artists need constructive criticism and positive feedback to improve. It’s time for us to start supporting each other.

NL: What’s been the most surprising discovery in the process of founding and launching the magazine?

NH: The demand for a publication of this nature is what surprised me the most. People are really excited about the project, because they want to have an uncensored space to see work, and have their work be seen. I get complaints that most of the spaces available to artists are pretentious and cater to only certain types of work. I believe it’s mainly the younger artists who share this sentiment — they feel excluded and they are intimidated by the current system’s set-up. This is why they gravitate to a lot of international spaces. There is that anonymity and that feeling of acceptance and open-mindedness. You have to be producing a certain type of work and moving within a certain circle of artists, you have to learn to speak a certain way.

I understand the importance of presenting yourself as an artist in a certain way, but I don’t think this approach gets through to the younger artists. They are not interested in this way of doing things. They like to think of themselves as rebellious and progressive, and they want a space like that where they can express themselves without feeling judged. There are a lot of stifled young people and artists in the Caribbean; we want to provide a space for them.

I want to help in the process of breaking down these walls in the region. I want our artists to be fearless when approaching us, regardless of the content of their artwork, but still maintain a high standard in the quality of work presented.

HB: I am most surprised by how amorphous ARC is. Even in its becoming, it changes every day. In this very premature stage we are coming to terms with how little we know. The learning curve gets steeper and we push on to create a space for it in order to honour its intention and merit. I think ambition and resources often clash. We have had a lot of support from our various networks and families. Without that, ARC would still be an idea.

The importance of envisioning your dreams can’t be overstated. When we started thinking about the project, it was in a neat container. Now it is free, without a lot of ideological judgments. I am not so naïve as to say we don’t have a purpose or agenda. The more we interact and show people what we are doing, new ideas, thoughts, and information materialise. We are very receptive to voices that we trust and we both have an intuitive sense of where we want this to be a in a couple years.

I am also very shy and self-conscious, and I have realised that through ARC my shame has sort of diminished. Even though it is still hard for me to fill roles that I am unsure of, every day I gain a little confidence. Pace is the trick. ARC is a full-time job for five people. I am still getting used to its dynamic, orders, and language.

Detail from West India Scenery (1836), by Richard Bridgens

This week the CRB publishes Jonathan Ali’s review of Moloch Tropical, the most recent film by the Haitian director Raoul Peck; as well as an essay by Judy Raymond on the nineteenth-century Trinidadian artist Michel Jean Cazabon. “He’s considered a pioneer,” Raymond writes,

and indeed in some respects he was. Even more importantly, we think of Cazabon as one of us. He was a Trinidadian, of mixed race, and his work evokes pride and nostalgia and a sense of pleasing familiarity . . . But the nostalgia evoked by Cazabon is for a Trinidad that may never have existed. And the more you look at his paintings, the odder they start to seem.

That’s because we look at him as if he were unique. In fact, Cazabon fits firmly into a tradition, and once he is set into this context, his paintings become, if no less idiosyncratic, then at least more understandable.

Raymond goes on to contrast Cazabon’s paintings and drawings with those of another artist working in Trinidad a generation earlier: the Englishman Richard Bridgens, today remembered by scholars and collectors for his West India Scenery (1836), an album of lithographs. Raymond — the editor of Caribbean Beat, Parliament columnist for the Sunday Express, and author of two biographical books — is now at work on a study of Bridgens, of whom, it turns out, relatively few documents have survived. Via email, she answered a few questions about her interest in Bridgens and the challenges of her research.

Nicholas Laughlin: Why did you choose Bridgens as a subject?

Judy Raymond: While I was researching what became the essay on Cazabon that you very kindly published in the CRB, I wanted to put Cazabon in context. His European artistic antecedents are sometimes mentioned, but you don’t hear anything about art in Trinidad before him. When I looked around, there was Mr Bridgens, lurking modestly in the wings, as was his wont.

I wanted to find out a bit more about him in turn: what was his professional background, and, other than designing the first, ill-fated Red House and drawing pictures of the slaves, what other work did he produce — and I was amazed by the answers. His career was surprisingly high-level and very diverse artistically and geographically, and the importance of his pictures of Trinidad is still massively underestimated, though a few academics have recently rediscovered him.

He’s now become an obsession. When I leave Parliament [in Port of Spain] on a Friday afternoon I’m picturing what his Red House would have looked like, with Prince Street running through the centre. Or what he would have seen in the 1830s, while he was walking home up St Vincent Street from the government offices, where he was the superintendent of public works, to his house in the new part of town, overlooking the Ariapita estate.

NL: Your two previous biographical works were of living subjects, available for interview and possessing their own archives. Where have you looked for and found material on Bridgens? Is there much archival material on him in Trinidad?

JR: Bridgens is a very shadowy figure, and there isn’t a lot of information on him anywhere. He knew and worked with a really stellar group of people, but I suspect his problem was that he lacked any talent for self-promotion. For instance, he did important work on the interior of Sir Walter Scott’s house, Abbotsford, but the first couple of times he crops up in Scott’s letters, it’s as “Mr Buggins” (a rather hobbit-like variant of his name). He didn’t always show up on the radar.

Worse, family history said his personal papers were destroyed in one of the many fires that have ravaged Port of Spain over the years. The surviving information on him has to be mined, nugget by nugget, and then the pieces put together like a jigsaw puzzle, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

My research so far has included visiting Holy Trinity Cathedral to look at the statue of Sir Ralph Woodford, and reading the slave compensation registers from 1836 (very well kept at the national library, I’m happy to say — a gloved librarian turned each page for me). I may yet go and browse through the burial registers at Lapeyrouse Cemetery.

But generally it would have been easier if I’d been based in London, or had access to the Yale Centre for British Art.

NL: Your essay on Cazabon in the current CRB argues for a more nuanced interpretation of his work than is generally held. Will your book on Bridgens suggest a new line of thinking on his work?

JR: Overall, yes, partly because so far as I know, no one has joined up the dots and told the story of his life and the course of his whole career, though different periods of it have received specialised attention.

But more importantly, when I tell people who know the pictures in West India Scenery what I’m working on, they say something like, “But those pictures are so horrible and racist!” Yes, they are — the book was published in 1836, and Bridgens was absolutely a man of his time, and had a vested interest in slavery.

But there’s much more to the pictures than that. I think just as novelists say their characters take on lives of their own, the same thing happened with the people in Bridgens’s drawings. They started off as caricatures and became portraits. In spite of himself, he was fascinated by them.

As a result, we know all sorts of details of the lives of people who would otherwise be totally forgotten, having been taken captive as children somewhere in west Africa just over two centuries ago, and then enslaved on sugar estates in north Trinidad. Bridgens inadvertently preserved their memories. I’ve even been able to put tentative names to a couple of the slaves in his pictures.

Detail of Tropical Night (2006–present), by Christopher Cozier (version installed for Afro Modern, Tate Liverpool, 29 January–25 April, 2010). Image courtesy the artist

Vous Êtes Ici (You Are Here), an exhibition of work by thirteen Caribbean artists, curated by Dominique Brebion, opens today at Fondation Clément in Martinique.

Brebion quotes Édouard Glissant —

The Creole language says ici-là (“here-there”) doubtless to extend the forces of “here” towards the infinite. It often instists on ici-là minm (“right here there”), nowhere else but here, which is nevertheless over there or up there (whence the Creole language gets là minm, “right there” meaning “right now, immediately”), as if to make a clean break between “here” and its near or far surroundings

— and asks, “How do the artists of the Caribbean perceive this ‘nowhere else’ which is theirs, but which remains an exotic and faraway ‘over there’ whose location is vague to all but the natives?”

Vous Êtes Ici includes work by Thierry Alet, Alex Burke, Christopher Cozier, Annalee Davis, Polibio Díaz, Tirzo Martha, Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart, Tony Monsanto, Ebony G. Patterson, Ingrid Pollard, Marcos Lora Read, and Oneika Russell.

Dawn Scott working on A Cultural Object in 1985. Photograph courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica

Dawn Scott, Jamaican artist, died on Tuesday 21 September in Kingston.

The National Gallery of Jamaica posted an obituary:

Figurative batik was Dawn Scott’s main medium for some twenty years, culminating in her solo exhibition Nature Vive (1994) at the Grosvenor Galleries in Kingston. By far her most impactful exhibition, however, was her contribution to Six Options: Gallery Spaces Transformed (1985), the National Gallery’s (and Jamaica’s) first exhibition of installation art. On this occasion, she produced A Cultural Object, a haunting, spiral-shaped “zinc fence” structure which transposed some of the realities of Jamaica’s inner city life into the gallery spaces of the National Gallery.

A Cultural Object, in permanent display in the NGJ’s contemporary galleries, is a powerful and disturbing work that continues to influence younger Jamaican artists, most recently Ebony G. Patterson, whose Cultural Soliloquy (Cultural Object Revisited) (2010) was included in the Young Talent V exhibition at the National Gallery.

In later years, Scott taught at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and worked as a fashion, interior, stage, and set designer. In 1999 she was awarded a Bronze Musgrave Medal for her contribution to Jamaican visual art. The citation read, in part:

Hers is a humanist art in which the human figure takes central stage. Her social concerns are reflected in her dignified but graphic depictions of the life of the working class.

Detail of A Cultural Object (1985), by Dawn Scott. Photograph by Nicholas Laughlin

Christian Campbell. Photograph by Sammy Rawal, courtesy Peepal Tree Press

Today is Independence Day here in Trinidad and Tobago — parades, flags, fireworks — and today we also wrap up the current issue of the CRB with three last features.

First, a portfolio of images from the painted wilde bussen — minibuses — of Paramaribo, accompanied by a short essay by your Antilles blogger. Decorated with hand-painted portraits of film stars and musicians, action heroes and politicians, the wilde bussen are a moving gallery of public art offering fascinating hints about the ideals and fantasies of contemporary Surinamese.

Next, the CRB’s “Also noted” column returns, with capsule reviews of ten recent books: poetry by M. NourbeSe Philip, Marion Bethel, and Jacqueline Bishop; a memoir by the late E.A. Markham; a new translation of a 1916 book by a pioneering Puerto Rican feminist; books on reggaeton and Haitian migrants; and more.

Finally, regular CRB contributor Lisa Allen-Agostini interviews the Bahamian poet Christian Campbell, whose debut book, Running the Dusk, was recently shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Campbell talks about his influences, literary and otherwise, about the shaping of his poetic voice, the texture of dusk in his book, and his sense of rootedness in multiple Caribbean locations:

I was raised by a Bahamian and a Trinidadian, and I was raised as a Bahamian and a Trinidadian. There’s also Grenada and Colombia/Venezuela (to open up the arc), and there’s likely Haiti somewhere down the line.

My breed of Caribbean person is not strange at all. I’m a UWI baby — my parents met at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. In the diaspora, and Toronto in particular, it makes perfect sense, because there is a lot of this cross-Caribbean mix-up business. The thing is, we haven’t really talked enough about what this means.

At a very early age, I knew the troubles and limits of nationalism and I know that I must also make trouble for the nation. My heritage gave me an innate sense of the broadness of the Caribbean and the many Caribbeans — “broader than Broadway,” as Barrington Levy would put it. It grounds me in my ability to fully draw on the spiritual resources of all the Caribbeans. It’s all mine.

Look out for a review of Running the Dusk in a future issue of the CRB.

And now that this issue of the magazine has closed, your Antilles blogger is hard at work on the September CRB, which will start publication next week Tuesday. I’m happy to say that this issue will include not only our usual coverage of books and visual art, but also a special section on Caribbean film, and our first regular music column. But more about those next week!

Rafael Ferrer c. 1969. Photograph courtesy Da Wire

When a critic referred to his style as “faux primitivism,” Ferrer objected that the characterisation was based on a prejudice about the people he depicted rather than on his way of painting them. “They can call the people in the paintings natives or they can call them inhabitants of this place or the other, but I call them neighbours.”

Actually, some of the first paintings Ferrer made after his return to the medium do betray a certain primitivism. I’m thinking of works like El Cuarteto (The Quartet) or Melida la Reina (Melida the Queen), both from 1981, which almost seem like elaborations of his paper-bag mask fantasies. But by mid-decade his style had become distinctly more sophisticated, settling into a sturdy Modernism that would not have looked outrageous to any of Ferrer’s early twentieth-century heroes but with a personal inflection that could never be confused with anyone else’s. Ferrer’s brush is tough, unsentimental; he prefers to show things bluntly rather than suavely coaxing them into visibility. His pictorial space can seem almost hammered into place — as if an imprint of his work as a sculptor. His use of the word “neighbours” to describe his subjects is quite precise. In painting the people who lived near him in the Dominican Republic, he was painting neither familiars — it is telling that although Ferrer has done self-portraits, he has rarely painted his family or close friends — nor complete strangers. Wariness and curiosity register in the faces of many of Ferrer’s subjects, although others appear more ingenuous. There is no false familiarity here, but rather a distance to be negotiated. And it can be negotiated.

— Barry Schwabsky reviews Retro/Active, a retrospective of work by the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer at El Museo del Barrio, in the September 13 Nation. The exhibition, curated by Deborah Cullen, opened in June and closed on 22 August.

Sharing at the Table (1999), by Seya Parboosingh. Image courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica

Seya Parboosingh, American-born artist living in Jamaica since 1958, died on Friday 13 August in Kingston.

The National Gallery of Jamaica blog published a short obituary:

The painter and poet Seya Parboosingh, née Samila Joseph, was born in 1925, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was of Lebanese descent. She attended the University of Iowa, where she concentrated on creative writing. Seya met and married Jamaican artist Karl Parboosingh in New York in 1957 and began to paint under his direction. The couple settled in Jamaica in 1958 and that year they had their first joint exhibition at the Kingston and St. Andrew Parish Library. Seya spent most of her active life in Jamaica and was a well-recognised member of the Jamaican artistic community . . .

The close artistic partnership between Seya and Karl Parboosingh continued until the time of his death in 1975 and arguably endured beyond that time. Some of her most poignant works were visual expressions of her grief at his passing.

The critic Petrine Archer wrote a profile of Parboosingh for Caribbean Beat in 2000. You can download a PDF of the piece here. Archer wrote:

Seya’s painting has always tended towards minimalism. Her surfaces are characterised by a handful of motifs and images that she uses again and again. Typical are her silent female figures and seemingly isolated objects drawn from nature. Flowers, fruits, birds, fish and angelic figures are painted so that they relate to each other, but still remain separate. Even when they touch they rarely interact; each object seems self-sufficient with a sense of wholeness. But partnered with one another, her subjects tell a story of cosmic unity and love among all things.

Un minuto antes de iluminarse (2009), by Alejandro Campíns; oil and acrylic on canvas; 120 x 100 cm. Image courtesy Servando Galeria de Arte

We live a strange sort of anachronistic poetry in Cuba . . . Even if you don’t want it to, this poetry influences what any artist here produces. You live in a house made in the 1950s, you wake up and turn on a brand-new Chinese TV, you go to the street and hop in an American car from the ’40s to get to your friend’s 1920s house. As a result, my painting goes to many different places . . .

There are days when I want to paint about, say, politics and other days when I want nothing to do with it. Sometimes I begin painting a lion and finish with a butterfly . . . I begin painting aggressively, and the finished painting turns out as something sweet.

— Cuban artist Alejandro Campíns, profiled by Julia Cooke in the Summer 2010 issue of Modern Painters (a special issue on “Latin America’s next big stars”). The profile includes a gallery of images of Campíns, his studio, and his paintings. (You can see further examples of his work at the dpm gallery website.)