Con baroque concerta collage made in the historic center of Havana, the French artist and pioneer of urban art Ernest Pignon-Ernest echoes both his own story and his admiration for the work of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier.
“Bad paper is the best there is,” he mischievously explains to the AFP Pignon-Ernestwhile he puts the finishing touches on the drawings that he is about to hang on a wall in Old Havana.
Pieces of newsprint recovered from newspaper presses The Worldcharcoal and black stone: the style of Pignon-Ernest It is unmistakable.
In the seven scrolls that will make up the final work, a series of historical figures stand out, from Vivaldi a Haendelpassing by the Aztec emperor Montezuma or the Cuban composer Joseito Fernandezauthor of the famous “Guantanamera”.
To participate in the fifteenth edition of the Havana Biennial (November 2024-February 2025), this 83-year-old artist has decided to link his work with a personal event: his first trip to Havana to attend the funeral of Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), died in Paris, where he lived his last 15 years.
“Something incredible happened,” he recalls. Pignon-Ernest.
“In 1980, one morning, the Cuban embassy called me. I didn’t understand what they were saying, because I didn’t speak Spanish. I called again shortly after and asked them: ‘Have you asked me to go to the embassy or to go to Cuba? No, Alejo Carpentier He has died, we would like you to come.’”
He emphasizes that at that time “he didn’t know anyone at the embassy or anywhere else” and he also didn’t know “why” he was wanted. “So I went to the airport,” summarizes the still surprised artist.
In Havana, the widow of Carpentier I was waiting for him at the foot of the plane stairs. “She told me: ‘My husband liked your exhibition (at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris) so much that he wanted to meet you.’
“I melted, because Carpentier it was like Gabriel Garcia Marqueza little inaccessible,” he says about the Cuban who won the Cervantes Prize in 1977.
Hence Pignon-Ernest has decided to evoke in his Havana collage baroque concerta short novel by the Cuban writer, published in 1974 and in which eras and continents mix.
The story tells the journey of a rich Mexican who, after a stopover in Havana, goes to Venice for the Carnival, where they appear Vivaldi, Haendel, Scarlatti y Luis Armstrong.
“It is an absolutely exceptional novel. “He affirms, with music, the universal dimension of culture,” he adds enthusiastically.
The protagonist “symbolically brings the music of the Caribbean and Africa” to Venice. “It is the meeting of all those musics. “It’s a kind of magnificent metaphor,” he says.
In Havana, to which he had not returned since 1980, Pignon-Ernestwith the help of a handful of assistants, set up his artists’ “balcony” on a wall that overlooks the Plaza de Armas, one of the oldest in the city.
The objective is always that the work is totally integrated into the place. “When it’s wet with glue, the paper becomes very thin, very fragile, and I can fit it into the slightest crevice in the wall. There is a kind of texture,” he says.
Once the glue dries, the work takes on a disturbing relief, which plays with perspective, with a Carpentier who looks from the window at the passers-by, not far from his accomplices, the French poet Robert Desnos (1900-1945) and the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen (1902-1989).
Havana thus joins the list of cities – Charleville-Mézières, Paris, Naples, Brest, Soweto, Algiers, Puerto Principe, Santiago, Ramala … – where Pignon-Ernest has pasted his life-size portraits, some of which have become icons like his Arthur Rimbaudthe “young man walking”, or his Pasolini holding his own corpse.
In the 1980s he created an installation in the Chilean capital with a hundred images of Pablo Neruda. “Often, poets, through their work and their destiny, embody their country,” he points out. Ernest Pignon-Ernest.
“What would we know about Chile without Pablo Neruda?”, he questions.
Pignon-Ernest He does not deviate from the line that has marked his career: making history speak with ephemeral works that only have value in the place where they exist.
In Havana, as everywhere, “the work is the place formed by the presence of my drawing,” summarizes the artist.
Fuente: AFP.
Photos: Adalberto Roque/ AFP.
