
© Luis López Chavez. Image: Manuel Castillo
Let’s start from the very beginning. Do you remember the moment when you understood that you would like to dedicate your life to art? How did you decide to become an artist?
It is hard to pinpoint such a moment in my memory. It would be necessary to delve into memories from my childhood – to articulate a narrative that outlines the foundations of my aesthetic sensitivity. Although I already have some of the inaugural memories tied up, it would be essential to dive deeper into these “waters”. But I will not! Biography and fiction are often the same genre. Confusion might look good when you are well along in years. But when you are still young, exorcising that romantic ideal of the “artist's destiny” is rather pedantic. Since it is still possible to end up in the sinks of a McDonald’s. On the other hand, today anyone can “be” an artist. Allegorism has supplanted technique and artifice in art. Let's keep childhood away from contemporary art. The creative and private shall remain far from the artificial and public.
At the start of your career, you have received a scholarship from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. How has this experience influenced your art?
Travelling to Sweden, I have left Cuba for the first time – my native country, which has become a physical and ideological prison for the majority of Cubans for over 60 years. It meant a climate different from the tropical heat, an idiosyncrasy opposite to the Caribbean, a strange language... And so on. Endless contrasts, as well as social, political and economic nuances that I had to face, fight and assimilate during these six months of the residency. At the end of that “educational” experience I was able to make art, or at least try to… I made a video installation as part of a group exhibition, a video art and a couple of environments on a frozen lake. In this regard, I cannot draw a qualitative conclusion from the artistic learning acquired. In part, because the contrast between the precariousness of material resources in artistic education in Cuba and their abundance in the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, caused a state of a childlike ecstasy where every project ended in a playful experimentation of the medium. However, I must admit that it was Cuban artistic pedagogy, that has contributed more to my artwork than the Swedish one. Maybe because that's the only thing we have here: words and time. With this experience I glimpsed, what is clearer to me today, that artistic residencies are generally not an appropriate space for creation. I reserve that credit to the artist's studio.

Your body of work is based on geometrical forms – one might think about Op art and the works of Victor Vasarely for example. To what extent have you been inspired by this art movement and how is it reflected in your art practice?
I have thought neither about Op Art as a reference to my work, nor about Víctor Vasarely. Although I am aware that some of my paintings have a marked optical formalism. If we frame the “field of references” to the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century, then I would say that my aesthetic tastes around abstract and geometric painting go through the Russian avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century by Kazimir Malevich, the Bauhaus by Joseph Albert and the Color Field by Mark Rothko. As for the Suprematism, I am still captivated by the radicality of the black square on a white background as “the new realism in painting” (this tension between the realistic and the abstract is continuous in my work). I am also interested in the German artist's theories on form and color, rigorously tested in his Homage to the Square series (how “the intersection of color” alone poses an autonomous aesthetic reality). And as for the American art – what captures my attention is the chromatic and spatial simplicity of Rothko’s works, where he was only interested in expressing basic human emotions (talking less about art and expressing more with art). According to Joseph Albert, “only appearances do not deceive.” Perhaps what you see in my works was what I saw in the drawings based on the optical illusions of Albert who, together with Víctor Vasarely, founded Op Art.
Your works represent the socio-historical context – could you please explain to us, what do you mean by this and what historical events do you refer to?
Art in a general sense represents the social and historical context in which it is created. Perhaps I, as artists often do, have said this truism in one of my statements, or some curator has wanted to burden my work with such conceptual weightlessness. The truth is that “yes”: My artistic practice is tied in a strange, if not addictive and masochistic, way to this decadent and totalitarian reality. Where to start... from the colonial legacy, and in the process, to ride the post-colonial discourses, activating Western collective guilt to in the end be part of the show of cultural vindication that those latitudes seek; from the ephemeral Cuban Republic, undermined by the regionalist and undemocratic character of the tropical island and by imperialist interventions; or from the more than sixty years of communist dictatorship. Any of these historical-conceptual frameworks, although they have a real and traumatic basis for those of us who live on the island, are laboriously woven in foreign academies. Since experiencing decadence and thinking about its aesthetics are generally antipodes. Furthermore, in Cuba, critical thinking is condemned to being “dissident,” while apologetics is crude propaganda. The middle is as rare as democracy. My work is based on the experience of the context, assuming the social, political and economic dynamics, although without theoretical pretensions to unravel this skein. Because, ultimately, any serious critical thought about this “situation”, inevitably guided by a logic of survival, of future economic prosperity and with no room for patriotism and political martyrdom, leads to emigration. And precisely the decision not to emigrate is what generates the helpful statement that “the work represents the socio-historical context”; but this is no guarantee that the artist generates an authentic response to the mentioned work-context relationship. Dissident or applaud? That is the dilemma that we face sooner or later when assuming “the socio-historical context” as the creative premise of the work. And it is clear that applauding here has its advantages and dissenting outside has its advantages either. But we are no longer talking about art, don't we!

© Luis López-Chávez' studio, 2024. Image: Manuel Castillo
Your artwork addresses themes such as space and emptiness. Does this emptiness refer to the physical space or it is rather an emotional inner state of a person? Or probably both?
Probably both areas. Because when we talk about universal topics, which due to their ontological gravity transcend idioms, it is inevitable not to get stuck in the “sands” that separate the physical and the metaphysical. This stuckness is what I call The Panic Spaces; those places where emptiness is evident in a trivial, although enigmatic and forceful way; spaces considered as errors, surpluses or collateral damage of architecture and urban planning, of the design of human life in society and, ultimately, of reason. In every project of reason there is a space of panic where everything, that escapes understanding and touches the underbelly of the unconscious, the intuitive and the visceral, ends up, like a tomb. Here you don't look for anything, because there is only emptiness, while tourist curiosity or intellectual interest are disappointed. Looking here means looking within, leaving aside cultural adornment, economic need, social contract or political imprint. In Cuba it happens that architecture, among everything else, is mired in profound destruction. Floor tiles are the new covering of the architectural void. They are, in fact, one of the constructive elements that persist after destruction as archaeological fragments that challenge the present. A situation that generates other spaces of panic, no longer a consequence of reason and its humanist project, but of its terrible and abject reverse: absolute power. Horror vacui continues to be the imperative that accompanies and counterbalances reason, both in democratic and dictatorial societies. Even if it is built under laissez faire, laissez passer or destroyed under totalitarian ideologies, it all comes down to filling the voids generated by the system itself with goods or slogans.
Besides you explore different notions of death – how did you come up with this topic and what aspects and key ideas related to death you would like to transmit with your art?
“Death” as a specific theme was not raised in my work, beyond the fact that these types of universal notions are the foundations of any art. The motivation for my practice begins in the material realm and not in the conceptual one. However, in the material world I am interested in its interaction with the human will, when it turns into objects and things. And even more so, when it becomes waste, garbage, or cultural surpluses. We talk about an encyclopedia in the trash, about mahogany furniture thrown into the street, about fragments of Afro-Cuban ceramics on the coast, about religious figures on the sidewalks, about animals sacrificed in public, about open graves... All this leads us to talking of rubble and putrefaction as something casual; of the lack of technique and professionalism as a social condition; of a decadent economy, of political amputation, of historical ignorance, of an atrophied culture... Precisely all this is the sadness of the tropics: death as a folkloric incentive par excellence, to which tourists flock like flies.

Luis López-Chávez, Nicho No. 3.2 Azul (díptico primario), 2024, oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm
You obviously prefer abstract forms & geometric abstraction specifically. Have you ever considered trying figurative art? Will you ever go in this direction?
The Panic Spaces series is figurative painting. Here domestic spaces of Cuban architecture are represented, from a classic pictorial technique, although without becoming naturalistic by definition, and altering some basic principles of composition and perspective. That is the use of a perfect overhead plane, unnatural by definition, showing a square hole reminiscent of a tomb in the living-room, where the floor covering is sometimes given by tiles with geometric motifs. That could give the perception of an abstraction. And I must recognize that this is a fundamental part of my work: establishing a pictorial image in the margins between figuration and abstraction.
One would have to look more closely to perceive traces of a Renaissance grisaille and a lean-fat process that recalls the Venetian technique, then a base that seeks to establish the middle tone of the painting, so important in Rembrandt’s work, to continue with a three-layer technique in the manner of many realist painters; plus, the fascination with the alchemy of media, varnishes, oils, etc. of traditional painting. All this reveals an almost childish desire to learn to paint like the Old Masters. Hence, contemporary artists such as Michaël Borremans and Luc Tuymans, to name two examples, are important references for my work. If these arguments were not enough to justify my figurative painting, I would say, paraphrasing Edward Hopper, that my intention is reduced to painting light and shadow on a surface.
You were born in Cuba and now live and work in Havana. I assume you are very familiar with the local contemporary art scene and have observed its evolution since the past decades. Could you please describe the transformation that Cuban contemporary art has been gone through?
Today is Thursday, June 27, 2024, which could be a trivial date for the panorama of contemporary Cuban art, because nothing happens here in the summer, or because not much happens during these times, but it is not. Today the first presidential debate of 2024 between Biden and Trump will happen in a few minutes. Few in Cuba pay attention to this fact, and even fewer artists. I will interrupt this answer to see the debate. 8:55 PM…
11:00 PM. Having seen Biden's poor and geriatric performance, it is most likely that with another Trump term, Cuban art will decline further. I allow myself this eccentricity to argue that everything that happens in Cuba depends on partisan elections in the United States. And art does not escape this strange and incestuous political relationship between both countries. In this dynamic, the island's artistic scene has seen periods of splendor (generally during Democratic mandates) and periods of crisis (Republican mandates). However, I must clarify that this reflection does not cover the first years of the Cuban Revolution, since other dynamics came into play, mainly our dependence on the USSR. If I have to mention some essential characteristics of the contemporary Cuban art scene, I would say that today we are further away than ever from envisioning a possible national collecting and a local art market. This scene will maintain its cycle of absolute dependence on American collecting, intermittent depending on the political relations between both countries, and on European collecting that includes Cuban art within a broader cultural package. (This reflection is between conjecture and utopia, because art collecting needs a middle class that was uprooted in Cuba; and the “new rich”, emigrants to Miami and returned to the “Homeland”, champion their evil aesthetic taste). On the other hand, although the legal figure of a private art gallery has never existed in Cuba, many projects opened around 2015 in an a-legal manner. Only one or two of them have survived, which preserves state hegemony over art spaces and institutions. These rooms give emerging artists the chance to exhibit their work and, perhaps, market it at a high ideological cost. In this sense, it should be mentioned that some international galleries have decided to work with Cuban artists and carry out projects on the island. Of course, this constitutes a relevant fact of oxygenation to the artistic panorama, but it isn’t enough to bring Cuban art to life. The exodus of artists is massive in the face of the political and economic crisis. Many of them have been able to pursue their careers in other latitudes. In this sea of omens, young art of good quality continues to emerge in Cuba.
Where else, except for art, do you draw inspiration from? What hobbies, activities or personalities are your key inspiration sources?
Going to the mountains or to the sea. Being alone or with a few people who do not speak much. Reading a good book, taking notes, thinking for a while. Working on something manual, preferably carpentry. Playing with my pets. Eating fruit in the countryside and cooking a good piece of meat on the fire. Good coffee, good rum and good cigar. Stoking the fire all night long. No art.

© Luis López-Chávez' studio, 2024. Image: Manuel Castillo
Interview conducted by Valentina Plotnikova