Carlos Alfonzo

Carlos Alfonzo Pastel Drawing

1987

In July of 1980, Carlos Alfonzo left Cuba in exile through the port of Mariel and arrived in Miami. At an early stage of his youth on the island, Alfonzo’s creative talent became apparent, an endowment he began to cultivate through formal artistic studies at the prestigious San Alejandro Academy and the University of Havana from 1969 to 1977. Carlos Alfonzo became disenchanted with the regime as a young man living and working within the Cuban system, cautiously navigating the emotional and artistic repressions of post-revolutionary life. Carlos Alfonzo decided to leave Cuba just eight months before the pivotal Volumen 1 (Volume 1) exhibition that heralded a new international direction in contemporary Cuban Art and where Alfonzo was slated to exhibit among those who would later become known as the “1980s generation.” With hopes of finally living an open life as an individual and artist, he endured a traumatic crossing via the Mariel boatlift to settle in Miami. Within the decade following his exile, the young artist and political refugee were awarded a Visual Artist Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington D.C., a Cintas fellowship in the Visual Arts, and his work was exhibited in solo and group shows on a national and international scale including the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the exhibition entitled Hispanic Art in the United States which traveled to seven prominent American institutions, and the 41st Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at Corcoran Gallery. Today, his work forms part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Gallery and Sculpture Garden, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and numerous institutions of worldwide prominence. Alfonzo’s style developed significantly, and his career as an artist matured during a period in which neo-expressionist figurative Art came to renewed global attention. As he was exposed to great works of modernist and contemporary Art in America, he internalized various styles – cubist, surrealist, expressionistic, and abstract expressionist – and adapted them to his free-flowing expression resulting in a style discernibly his own. A magical body of work emanated, combining intense autobiographical experience with cross-cultural mythologies in an oeuvre laden with penetrative, intimate messaging that recounts the soul and struggle of the artist’s life experience through a stark, resonant system of forms. Alfonzo employs the spiritual iconography of African deities, Catholicism, and the ritualistic emblems of Santería in heads, disembodied facial features, daggers, and arrows to hauntingly convey eternal paradoxes of the human condition and the unconscious, an impression recognized by the leading art critics of the era. Carlos Alfonzo emerged not simply as a Latin American artist but as a celebrated artist of the Americas.