Notice the poor little man splashing around near the bottom of Luis Cruz Azaceta's painting "Swimming to Havana." Even if he were to somehow escape the high cement walls of the angular pool of water that contains him, he'd still be trapped in the maze of jagged abstract shapes that twine around the edges of the canvas. There's no way out. Not physically. Not psychologically.

Contemporary Arts Center. New Orleans

Interview with Friedhelm Mennekes

By Gerardo Mosquera

Originally written for Wynwood. The Art Magazine. Images courtesy of Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
http://wam-magazine.com/luis-cruz-azaceta-museum-plans-series

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Luis Cruz Azaceta (Havana, 1942) is an artist whose work carries the indelible imprint of displacement. The solitude, cultural and linguistic isolation, and the certainty of no longer belonging anywhere has marked his view of the world since he immigrated to the United States from Cuba at the beginning of the sixties. Throughout his career, his works have continually exuded that feeling, whether veiledly or explicitly. His perspective is that of a displaced individual attempting to find a personal route in the midst of that strange labyrinth that is identity.

There is almost nothing in Luis Cruz Azaceta’s Museum Plans, his recent exhibition of mixed media at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, that makes one think of 1980’s New York. Certainly, there is a path one can follow in Azaceta’s stylistic transformation, from those garish, colorful, idiosyncratic self-portraits, reflecting the Neoexpressionist Geist of the Reagan years, to this more sober, abstract, less iconoclastic, nonetheless thought-provoking work of today. In the mid-1980’s Azaceta appropriated “la balsa” (the raft image), made it his signature and pursued it relentlessly, this is before the raft became “cool” in the art of the Bedias and the K-Chos of the world.