Untitled

An early member of Grupo Provisional, alongside Carlos Cárdenas and Glexis Novoa, Planes emerged in late 1980s Cuba as “the closest thing to an individualist artist in Cuba,” according to Luis Camnitzer. “Working in a stream-of-consciousness fashion,” Camnitzer continued, “he combines extensive self-portraiture with philosophy, politics, sex, scatology, and poetry in an endless flow of baroqueness.” Planes adhered to the motto, “Life is shit and the world is crazy, or viceversa,” and declared, “I am interested in the process of doubting, in things such as whether or not humankind will survive, in the relation of the rational with irrationality” (New Art of Cuba, Austin, 2003, pp. 274-76). His early works, such as the present Untitled, fully embrace both the existential and the hyperbaroque, rendered here in a fantastical and biomorphic Surrealism.

Untitled presents multiple and incongruous scenes against a saturated, blood-red ground: a pile of eyeballs, one with a Magritte-inspired iris; a diminutive (yet also Atlassian) figure that holds aloft a large orb; a leaf-like field of green punctured by horns. The handwritten text is foreboding, warning that “hope is in mourning,” and the image portends violence and surveillance, its figures battling within a primeval (or post-apocalyptic) ground. “As disturbing as these strange fairy tales are,” notes critic Catherine D. Anspon of Planes’s paintings, “they are also shot through with a riotous joie de vivre. Part Kenny Scharf and part Lari Pittman; part Max Ernst and part Hieronymus Bosch, Planes’s bizarre world…is utterly disarming” (“Segundo Planes,” ARTnews 101, no. 7, Summer 2002, p. 182).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park