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 Havana’s La Lisa neighborhood and for the next three years exhibited as part of several group and personal shows.

In 1991 he was accepted to become 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 rheumatology, some of which were published abroad.

Lazo has been exhibited often in the United States, and in several shows, including two previous one-man exhibits, at the Cuban Art Space, in 2000 and in 2005. When he exhibited in the 1999 “Maferefún” exhibit, a group show in New York curated by the Center for Cuban Studies, the Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, an invited speaker at the exhibition, compared Lazo’s work to that of José Bedia, and could not leave without purchasing one of his paintings for his own collection. Since then Lazo’s intensity and richness of color, symbol and texture has grown and deepened. For the last five years he has been living in Spain outside of Barcelona. He is the father of a five year old son, Saúl.

Alejandro Lazo will be here for the run of his show, but will travel to Oxford, Mississippi (November 11- 16) for the opening on November 13 of a one-man show curated by Milly Moorhead West. While here, he can be found painting every day at the Cuban Art Space! (He insists that people watching him does not disturb him.)

His works spring from the Afro-Cuban religion of Palo Monte or Palo Mayombe, which is extensively described in Miguel Barnet’s excellent work Afro-Cuban Religions (Princeton, Markus Wiener, 2001, 2006) in his chapter “The Regla of Palo Monte.” He writes in part that Regla Conga, Regla de Palo, Palo Monte, Mayombe define most comprehensively this religion. “The name refers to the sticks [palos] or branches from the forest that are used as a magical element in spells. This definition can include other Cuban Congo sects, and in fact it encompasses the magical rits of almost all the others. Mayombe or Palo Monte is one of the most widely known and popular rites. It is said to be used for evil; that is, it is ‘Jewish’ rather than ‘Christian.’ It is also said to resemble weeds and is associated with the dead. People use it when they wish to dabble in evil. Coal and gunpowder are used in bad works that are performed, preferably on Tuesdays, as that is the day of the Devil...

“In mayombe, Kandiempembe, the devil incarnate, the endoqui malo (bad endoqui) is the spirit of the dead and of murderers and suicides. He is also the spirit of sorcerers. Mayombe can also be ‘Christian’ – that is, used for doing good works and healing. Those attempting to decipher the cults’ content and to devise a rigid structure are confronted by a confusing mess. This is due to the fertile imagination of practitioners who historically used esoteric codes and other measures to conceal the true nature of their activities from white nonbelievers. . . . the myths, stories and legends that [the Bantu] managed to bring with them were subjected to all kinds of influences in the new environment. This transformed them into something different and created that language, rich in sayings and axioms, that is characteristic of the Congos. It also created a flexibility and, above all, a capacity for adapting to suit the times and for using external elements to enrich its own values.

“It is easy, then, to see why some people regard mayombe as a ‘Jewish’ sect in which black magic is practiced and whose members engage with the dead, while for others this religion is as salutary and constructive as any other cult group within the Bantu family...

“The mayombero or palero works with earth, forest branches, stones, animals and all kinds of plants and objects. They assist him in the spells that he uses to save his clients. All the forces of nature, all living elements of nature – animate or personified – are found in Congo ceremonies. Like the gods or supernatural beings, these elements are the vehicles through which the palero can articulate his ritual language. In a distinctly animistic way, the palero uses nature to explain life. His oracle invokes the gods and natural forces in order to communicate ideas. In other words, the gods are explained by humans, and not vice-versa. This is also expressed in a very eloquent African proverb: ‘Sambia speaks in the language of humans.’”

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..."

* Photographs by Nan Melville

PAINTINGS IN PRIVATE COLLECTIONS (partial listing)

Naomi Wallace and Bruce McLeod, London ● Brandon Fradd, New York City ● Terry Satinover Fagen, Chicago and New York City ● Donald R. Rubin, New York City ● 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 • Elsbeth Bothe, Baltimore • Carla Wallace, Lexington, Kentucky • John Pincus, New York City ● Joanne Soja, New York City ● Holly Holberg Brooks, Los Angeles • Mimi Lehder, Los Angeles • Sandra Levinson, New York City • Georg Stanford Brown, Los Angeles • Margot Adler, New York City • Cesar Gaviria, Bogota • Niurka Pérez, Havana • Jose Antonio Jimenez, Havana • Ed Moose, San Francisco • Susan Sillins, New York City ● Kate Bix, Minneapolis ● Evelyn Daitz, New York City. ● Judy Irola, Los Angeles ● John Magliocci, New York City.