Tonel emerged in the early 1980s as part of Cuba’s vaunted Volumen I generation with a critical practice of caricature, advancing a long tradition of satirical illustration stretching from Conrado Massaguer and Jaime Valls to Chago and Rafael Fornés. Informed by Pop art and underground comix, his practice soon took a conceptual turn as he explored questions of ontology and language, sexuality and geography—often through the medium of self-portraiture, in the guise of the recognizable male character that recurs throughout his work. Frustrated and anxious by turn, this figure takes the unlikely form of a chair in the present sculpture, whose design acknowledges its linear conception (two related drawings) and its functional futility as a chair that thwarts its sitter.

“In one wooden sculpture in the form of an armchair self-portrait, Tonel appears as though both of his arms had been amputated,” writes curator Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, referring to La silla. “He is throwing up, spewing a well-delineated stream of (verbal? ideological?) vomit. The image functions on multiple levels: as a refusal of everything that the body—and the spirit—will not tolerate; as an impediment to others who would use the ‘chair,’ who would provide a ‘fifth leg.’ A play on words in an earlier work is already announced: ‘Vomit-is-culture’ [‘vomit sculpture’]: inexhaustible, gravid jetsam providing relief, temporarily restoring one’s emptiness” (“Solitude Laid Bare in the Garden of the Madhouse,” Tonel: Lessons of Solitude, exh. cat., Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2000, p. 30).

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