Tenacity is a quality forged through perseverance and grit that, until recently, was hailed as a virtue. But in our fast-paced New Millennium that advocates short-termism and palliative immediacy, its reputation appears to be taken a bit of a bashing. And yet, wherever it is discovered and revealed, it is still a value, a boon.

 

A quality that in artists such as Roberto Diago (Havana, Cuba, 1971) and Carlos Nicanor (Gran Canaria, Spain, 1974) is instantly apparent as soon as we set eyes on their work. Firstly, because they both have a huge body of work to show for it, multidisciplinary through its exploratory nature when visual language is a kindred spirit to them, encompassing: drawing, painting, murals, sculpture, monumental sculpture of exteriors, installations, graphics and multiple formats. Secondly, because both artists display a certain interest in delving into the transatlantic cultural wealth that coexists with Western models nowadays, the result of syncretism, acculturation and colonisation experienced in our lands.

 

They both explore Atlantic culture as a repository of poetry, philosophy and fable, as an infinite container of knowledge, as a primordial part that defines us. Carlos revisiting his local Canarian roots and his Mediterranean links; Roberto revisiting his Afro-Cuban roots and transatlantic links.

 

Roberto Diago, for his part, carved a route back to his origins through three generations prior to his own: that of his grandfather (a close personal friend of Wifredo Lam and Agustín Cárdenas, to name just two key figures of the Cuban historical avant-garde), then those who, although labelled folklorists as Afro-Cuban artists of the sixties/seventies (I’m thinking of Manuel Mendive and Eduardo Choco), never sought to renounced their Négritude, and José Bedia, who was accompanied early on in his career by figures such as Francisco Elso Padilla and Ricardo Brey. Diago is lucky in that, in addition to these searches – more ethnographic and conceptual than biopolitical – he can add the current decolonial gaze on racialisation. As a Black man, his work is built as a polysemic, polyhedral response, with multiple edges, where the racial and the ancestral come together.

 

Carlos Nicanor, on the other hand – or perhaps we should say in another direction since both artists are never still, always moving –, puts forward his work from an introspective position. While most artists of his generation debated the post-photographic image, Nicanor angled his investigations towards the way in which culture is constructed as a cluster of mythologies and coexistence  – not always peaceful or non-violent – with nature. While Diago determined to continue along a path trodden by his predecessors, including relatives, Carlos stood still, looked around and found in wood an ancestral material of dissent, in opposition to the plastic and plasticised materiality of screens, although his was not in any way a technophobic stance. Nicanor understood from his early youth that his approach to Art is through its materiality, its construction as a manageable thing, something made by hand. His searches for utopian universes of representation have not come from the documentary imagery of the image but from the body, or from whatever living and imagined organism behaves as a body, an amorphous mass to be discovered.

 

From the way these two sculptors approach their art form, I deduce that persistence and tenacity are two attitudes that are a slow burn, cooked over a low flame: Diago, through a reinterpretation of his origins, which he combines like a story with his everyday life, his condition as a native of Havana, a man born and raised in a working-class suburb,  although his family did not exactly fit this demographic profile; rather they were educated individuals who created the pillars of modern Cuban culture; and Carlos through an almost primalistic approach, as Thompson would say almost anthropological, with an element so characteristic of the arts and crafts movement in the Canary Islands, with its timber heritage, the hallmark of his object-construction. Where basketwork, clay and wood are natural elements and languages from which the popular culture of the Canary Islands has been constructed.

 

Carlos draws his work out like a poetic mystery, where the meticulousness of his painstaking work becomes a tactile thing, a thing touched, caressed by the precious persistence of an artist who finds a glossy mother-of-pearl shimmer in any rustic material; while for Diago, through his training as a sculptor, planes and fractals constitute the materiality of each object that surrounds him, providing the frame he needs to create a head, flatten a landscape, deconstruct a house, a monument, or brace a wall to shelter us. Even if that side is visually brutalist, rustic in its presence, where imperfections become the mechanics of provisionality to which Cuban culture is doomed.

 

Both showing us two sides of the same metaphor, its smooth, polished, mirrored side, and its abrupt, wild, untamed side. Both artists seem to me to embody a very pertinent form of PERSISTENCE, as does the tenacious work of Galería Artizar, working tirelessly from the farthest reaches of the Canary Islands to bolster and support the force of their poetics. Perhaps it is because, in these times of technocratic trifles and narcissistic vagrancies, many forget that popular proverb Victory belongs to the most persevering.

Omar-Pascual Castillo