About Alejandro Lazo Montaner

Alejandro Lazo is a self-taught painter born in Havana in 1970. He began painting in 1986 at the age of 16 as part of the atelier in the Adolfo Delgado cultural center in the San Agustin neighborhood in La Lisa, on the outskirts of Havana. When he finished high school, he became a member of an artists' group at the Domingo Ravenet Gallery in La Lisa and for the next three years, exhibited as part of several group and personal shows.

In 1991 he was accepted as part of the "independent artist register" at the Fondos de Bienes Culturales (the Cultural Patrimony Fund, which operates as a government artists' agency) and began participating in a new series of exhibits in Cuba and abroad. He was only 21 at the time. At the same time he was developing his own unique style, he earned money illustrating research works and scientific articles relating to medical anthropology and reumatology, some of which were published abroad.

Critic Conrado de la Torre Saenz has written about Lazo's work that he "paints with energetic, vital and defiant gestures, a turmoil of feelings smashed in his mistreated head; ideas pop out and gain body and character through the lines, sinuous and cracked. Spots of color, dense and misty, shape a reality created from his most relevant everyday behavior. . . . his works are pictorial gestures unmasked, psychograms of an internal representation, intensely emotive, where the creative act is like a rite in which the tools of painting are the fingers and the hands and this material bears the imprint of the artist's epideral contact with the pigment . . .

"The action of painting, an essential and unbearable element for releasing his restrained impulses, is a certain cathartic and purifying exercise, an emotional discharge through which the artist, when conceiving each of his works, pours out his most intimate feelings. This way of creating is thus related to abstract expressionism and, specifically, to action painting, but in the creative act of the artist which differs from the former, there are no drippings or automatic movements; on the contrary, the construction of each operative system obeys a rational, constructive and ordered reflection despite the spontaneity of traces and the free dissemination of colors on the surface. Each work is full of content treated by the artist in this microcosm of idols and fetishes, voluptuous artifacts and fabricated landscapes. . . .

"His works depict a kind of ecstasy in which the artist is immersed, aware that he lives in the vortex of a tropical hurricane . . . "

A SELECTED LIST OF EXHIBITIONS

Group Shows:

May 1994: Los que estan, Domingo Ravenet Gallery, during the 5th Biennial, Havana
March 1995: Cultivadores de Almas, El Castillito Recreational Center, at the 8th Annual Meeting of Video Producers, Havana
May 1997: No son todos los que estan, Domingo Ravenet Gallery, during the 6th Biennial
October 1997: Arte Periferico, Domingo Ravenet Gallery, Havana
November 1997: Subasta de Invierno, exhibition and auction, Gran Teatro de La Habana
March 1998: Subasta de Verano, exhibition and auction, Gran Teatro de La Habana
September 1998: Maferefun Cuba, Center for Cuban Studies, Metropolitan Pavilion Gallery, New York City
September 1999: Contemporary Cuban Art, Cuban Art Space, New York City
October 1999: Maferefun Cuba II, Cuban Art Space, New York City
September 2000: Contemporary Cuban Art, the Art Institute of Boston, Boston

One-Man Shows

June 1994: El extasis de vivir en el vortice, Domingo Ravenet Gallery, Havana
September 1996: Nkiso vs. Neurosis, Origenes Gallery, Gran Teatro de La Habana
April 1998: Esas brisas que perturban al amanecer, Luis de Soto Gallery, Havana University
October 1998: Sin mpolos ni tabues, Domingo Ravenet Gallery, Havana
December 1999: Antes que Dios amanezca, Espacio 52 Gallery, Havana

PAINTINGS IN PRIVATE COLLECTIONS (partial listing)

Robert Farris Thompson, Yale University • Eliseo Asencio, M.D., New York City • Pedro de Armas, M.D., New York City • Julie Belafonte, New York City • Lawrence Bender, Los Angeles • Naomi Wallace, London • Carla Wallace, Lexington, Kentucky • Holly Holberg Brooks, Los Angeles • Mimi Lehder, Los Angeles • Sandra Levinson, New York City • Georg Stanford Brown, Los Angeles • Ramon Trigo Bode, New York City • Cesar Gaviria, Bogota • Niurka Perez, Havana • Jose Antonio Jimenez, Havana • John Pincus, New York City • Susan Sillins, New York City . . .