Lidzie Alvisa

[…] The Cuban artist Lidzie Alvisa does not cease to experiment and place herself in the polemic crossroad of the new and different in contemporary visual arts. Over and over again she thinks of proposals that will be consistent in conceptual terms; that is why she focuses on matters to which she had never paid attention. In each one of her series she presents the human body from dissimilar points of view, from the most intimate to the most universal from a part to the whole. That is the case of Carrera de triple filo, where she insists in representing a part of the body to create new restlessness in the viewer, now using themes as familiar as power relations and homosexuality. Feminine legs about to start running are represented carrying the necessary spurs for their defense, as well as masculine legs showing those attributes to climb in life, the way one climbs to reach socially privileged positions. The lens focuses them in perpetual confrontation, rub or caress, mingled, entering and leaving the setting or marching in the same direction. They are legs that support the full lightness of the human being; masculine legs belonging to suggestively naked bodies that create a lustful atmosphere where pleasure and the simultaneous pain produced by more or less violent rubbing are detected. Because precisely the body’s absence contributes to the doubt, and it is with suspicion and fruitful ambiguity that the best hypotheses of meaning are born to fill in those undetermined zones of the piece.

The artist goes beyond the idea of how sharp life’s career is, where you enter and escape, sometimes you hurt and others you are hurt. Her thought penetrates more internally into the complexities of the human being, into the social constructions moving around him, and particularly around homosexuality, which is still considered by a large majority as degenerate, aberrant and many other pejorative qualities. It is true that since the decade of 1960, the so-called minorities attained recognition and a space of their own within the postmodern cultural order. Nevertheless, it would be naïve to ignore that said permissibility has always been exerted from the center, which means that we are speaking of an influenced freedom with numberless more or less flexible prerogatives depending on those with the possibility of exercising control. In this way Lidzie succeeds in exposing the profound and repressive structure hidden by power relations, detects where the authoritarian element operates and points out the need to eradicate the hierarchy of those binary oppositions […]. ¹

1. Julienne López, “Speaking of Intimacy… A Circumnavigation of Lidzie Alvisa’s Work,” Artecubano, no. 1, 2015.