An Interview with Luis Cruz Azaceta

Edward J. Sullivan

This interview was conducted August 5, 1998 in New Orleans, Louisiana

Edward Sullivan: Let’s talk a bit about the exhibition. Is it all recent work?

Luis Cruz Azaceta: Yes, it’s all work from the last three years.

ES: Did you find that when you moved to New Orleans your work changed in any specific ways?

LCA: I always liked to change my work from series to series, but after moving to New Orleans I think that the changes have been more dramatic. In New York I always wanted to work with different materials but I never did because of space concerns. I had a small studio and to deal with three-dimensional things was hard; storing wood, for instance, was problematic. Moving to New Orleans gave me that opportunity and now that I have a large studio I can work with this type of material. During the past three years I’ve been working on various surfaces, mainly wood, plywood. In these paintings I have created a centralized image done with charcoal and gesso; then the whole painting is sealed with shellac. You then have a very solid surface and the image in a very fragile medium so the result is a play of opposites. The shellac also creates a transparency which is very attractive and has its own natural glow. In this series I have essentially been stripping down the paintings, going right to the essence of what I want to say by using an economy of means. Hopefully I’m successful.

ES: In this new work there appears to be a great emphasis on the dichotomy between dark and light, hardness and softness.

LCA: Yes, it’s true. Among the ‘hard’ elements in these paintings are metal studs. I use them as twisted or straight containers or receptacles in which I place the photographs. Another thing I like about the metal studs is that they have a reflective surface, so when you compare this shininess with the opaque surfaces of plywood, for instance, there’s that combination of opposites going on. Then with the soft charcoal, which is very fragile, you have the contrast with the hard shellac which acts as a sealer of the charcoal. It makes the charcoal kind of drip into the surface, which creates the beautiful grey tonalities in the white background that I use. I do the image with charcoal and then I paint the background right away with gesso to get rid of the look of the wood, leaving just traces of the wood grain around the edges. Sometimes if I overdo it I come back and re-incorporate pieces of wood onto the surface to give the feeling of pure wood, sort of like a collage.

ES: And then you cover the whole area of the image with shellac?

LCA: I get a bucket or a can of shellac and I just pour it over the image, letting it drip and then I control that a little bit. The chemistry of the gesso and the shellac creates something attractive. It makes a surface that looks somewhat broken.

ES: These new paintings have a spontaneity that is new and even somewhat shocking in your work.

LCA: The use of the shellac gives a sense of spontaneity when I let it drip. But I think that my work has always been very immediate and spontaneous; I don’t think that it’s been really very thought out. The gestures have never been very practiced or meditated. I would get a tube of paint and make a mark and if it works I leave it and if it doesn’t I paint it out.

ES: In this series there seems to be a new sense of physicality.

LCA: That’s maybe because of the materials—physical materials, wood, the nails. It’s a more "object" kind of work of art. You see a certain process going on here that prior to now wasn’t observable in my work.

ES: You mentioned that in this new work your are trying to evoke the "essential" elements of things. I get the feeling, in many of the paintings, of something iconic, almost religious or sacramental, although not in any traditional sort of way. Did you have any of those intentions while making this art?

LCA: You’re probably right in a way, although I didn’t think of it. Yes, they are somewhat like icons. By isolating an image and centralizing it on a surface you’re creating an icon and it becomes, in a certain sense, something like a religious object, even though that’s not my intention.

ES: Many of the people in these paintings seem to me to represent the embodiments of human values or human pain. Are you conscious of this?

LCA: What I try to do in my work is to go from the particular to the universal statements. That’s the whole aim of isolating the image and stripping away from it anything extraneous. To convey that kind of essence, I depict, for example, a man in a boat making a journey, emphasizing the universality of it by its isolation. In some of these pictures I have outlined the figures with nails. This is to enhance and play up the feeling of isolation.

ES: It seems to me that much of your new work has to do with violence.

LCA: That’s a good observation. In my previous work there was violence that was dealing with the victim. Here the violence is more explosive, more anonymous. It’s not depicted in a graphic way, it’s more insinuated by my use of the materials such as the metal studs.

ES: In this new series there are many figures which tend to physically merge together. Is this something new?

LCA: Yes, in this series I am doing couplings, a man and woman, sometimes myself with my wife in different situations, bound together by life, by whatever condition you want, including the journey of life.

ES: Part of the work in this exhibition deals with boat imagery. You have used this often in the past. Does it take on a new life here? Do you see this work as a direct continuity of your past art or are you looking to make new statements here?

LCA: The boat as a theme has always been in my work. It’s very much a part of my being in exile in this country. It’s part of my experience even though I didn’t come from Cuba in a boat.

The boat theme could also be seen as a more universal reference—to the journey that we all make. At some time or other in the lives of all of us we want to escape certain realities and therefore the boat can be understood as a metaphor for this escape, whether it’s mental or physical. However, these new works are done very differently from my earlier boat paintings.
I should point out that even though there will be several paintings with boat themes in the exhibition, this wasn’t my prime idea for the show. I have many other themes that I have tackled in a new way.

ES: Let’s talk a bit about your photography as it’s such a striking and new element in your work.

LCA: Although I’ve done photography for a long time, when I came to New Orleans I started using photography as a material in my art. I went all around the neighborhood to familiarize myself with what’s here and one way of doing that was by shooting photographs. Little by little they started creeping into my work. In l994 I was shooting Polaroids that I incorporated into the paintings. I had always worked by creating a strong central image in my paintings. By adding the photographs I’m inviting the viewer to come closer to the painting and the surface of the work. With a large composition the viewer is kept at a distance but I find that the photographs have served, maybe even unconsciously, as a device to bring the viewer into the surface of the work.

ES: I wanted us to talk about what I see as the spiritual quality in your work as a whole and these new paintings in particular. Some critics have commented on what they have seen as the "hopelessness" in your art while others have cited the sense of positiveness or optimism in your art. Could you clarify this?

LCA: Being of Latin, of Spanish descent, our culture deals with tragedy perhaps more than others. I think that this comes out in my work... this tragic type of iconography. But by doing those works, I think it’s an act of hope.

ES: Your work sometimes brings to my mind that of Francisco Goya, who painted tragedies but who also inserted a note of hopefulness or optimism within them.

LCA: Well, yes. In fact, Goya was one of the most inspirational artists I’ve encountered. Goya turned me onto the right path of painting, or what I think is the right path. When I saw his "Black Paintings" some years back when I was a student I was blown away. An artist has to think about what he wants to say with his work and I think that Goya is the one who really directed me when I was in my earliest stage. Goya still continues to be a strong force for me. He’s one of my heroes.

ES: Speaking of Goya, I’m reminded in your work of his fondness for dark colors. In this new series of paintings there’s a great concentration on dark, almost monochrome coloring. The lack of color here is a really strong statement.

LCA: If there is any relationship between the colors of these paintings and those of Goya it’s totally unconscious, or maybe there are some remnants of the influence I felt from him that started more than 30 years ago. The lack of color here was done, of course, on purpose. Throughout the 70s and 80s I was best known for the intensity of the coloring of my work. But now we’re in the 90s and I firmly believe that my work has to change from series to series so as to keep on growing, to keep on expanding my vocabulary.

My themes have always been the same throughout the past twenty or twenty five years but I’m very conscious of not repeating myself. I don’t want to become mechanical. If you already know from one painting to the next what one will be, to me that’s boring. So I stop at a given point to explore certain ideas and start something new. This isn’t just for the sake of experimentation, I go straight at it. The struggle is really a challenge. When I really get to know the mediums then I know that a series is going to emerge from this struggle. Some of the works I start I might destroy or paint over until I come to a point when I know it’s right.

ES: Let’s talk about a rather controversial theme for a moment. You’ve been included in a number of group exhibitions of Latin American and Latino painters and sculptors. Are you comfortable with that classification as "Latin American" artist? Do you think that the term has any validity?

LCA: It’s a hard question to answer. I can’t say that I don’t like being called a Latin American artist because that would be like putting down Latin American art or Latin American culture. I feel very much Cuban. I’m Cuban but I’m also an artist. My formation was in New York. My formation was not as an artist in Latin America. So I always consider myself to be an artist in exile. I think that there’s a zone or a country that we call "exile. " It’s neither here nor there; perhaps it’s in your own head. I think that that’s where I belong, in that parameter, like a hybrid in many ways. I think I have the formation of both cultures: living in Cuba for 18 years and then all the past thirty-something years living in the United States. I think that the formation of both cultures has made me who I am.

ES: Do you think that your work has anything in common with some of the other Cuban artists in exile?

LCA: When I first came here the Cuban artists I met were still into Impressionism. I really didn’t have any peers of my own generation at that time in New York. The artists from Cuba that I met then were older than I was and with a different way of thinking and they perceived my work as totally bizarre. I was dealing with kind of bloody subject matter and they were somewhat repulsed by it. They didn’t see any beauty in it and I thought that this was a very bourgeois type of mentality. It’s funny because I relate more to the young artists coming out of Cuba today than the artists of my own generation.

ES: So you have interest in contemporary art in Cuba?

LCA: I’ve met a lot of the artists in New York and I’ve seen their work and I think that Cuba is producing a terrific bunch of young artists. It’s a phenomenon. They’re struggling with information, with lack of materials, problems that older generations didn’t have. The new generation has so much talent, so much originality. I also notice they respond to my work. They come to my shows; there’s a kind of responsive communication that I feel when I’m talking to them. I see a lot of connections with their work and that makes me feel younger; it makes me feel like I’m part of something that I wasn’t a part of before.