Noel Morera Cruz (Matanzas, Cuba, 1962) stands out for his extremely praiseworthy versatility as an artist. In his career there has been no room for reiteration or stagnation of any sort. On the contrary, he has always been a nonconformist, inclined to periodic change and renewal, without renouncing his own style, the peculiar poetics in his morphological and conceptual statements. Such rupturist, ever-renewed vocation, which glimmers from within Noel’s plastic universe, greatly oxygenates the process through which his work is received, given the multiplicity and richness of the shades it suggests, at the same time keeping a distance from a certain trend in current Cuban art toward aesthetic redundancy, toward signic exhaustion. Noel’s iconography switches randomly from human to animal or plant figures; from warm to cold, intense to neutral shades (though the latter generally prevail); from the detailed, punctilious stroke to the gestural, bold, self-assured mark; from the planimetry of shapes to the smart use of foreshortening and perspective resources; from figuration to prying into abstract domains (without reaching abstraction proper); from monotype to oil, acrylic or a mixed medium. But alas, nothing to do with realistic mimesis; he would rather favor expressionism in its most transgressive forms.

One of the most emblematic figures in his work is the character of Zorro. The artist mocks Zorro with plenty of sarcasm and a delicious sense of humor; let’s say that he turns him into some sort of antihero, relieves him of his redeeming mission, and launches him to exotic adventures, more geared to playfulness and effeminate posing than to the liberating or safeguarding experience. We thus watch Zorro in very intimate circumstances, cleaning off the “shit” he has been carrying on his shoes, trimming his nails on the eve of a date, or in “suspicious” dealings with Little Red Ridinghood. Occasionally the artist’s subversive outlook goes as far as transvesting the hero or providing him with feminine attributes, as when he turns him into a girl enamored of the figure of Che. From the way he brandishes his sword (Levis, Espectacular –Spectacular–) to the manner in which he sits or keeps his mask in place (Sorpresa –Surprise–), the climate of jeering and caricaturization to which Zorro is subjected by the artist’s mischievous intention is all-pervasive. So obvious is Zorro’s unskillfulness, so much does he still need to learn, that Noel has decided to have him sit in a classroom and take a few lessons (Capacitación / Education).

Other works show groups of small human beings in varying contexts, engaged in grazing sheep (Concilio / Council), in combat against a group of peers (Bandos / Bands), engrossed in a strange “Christmas”, leaping into the air –in a sort of mass suicide– (Caída libre – Free Fall)… The latter piece is truly disturbing for its sociological, anthropological and even philosophical sagacity. The fall seems to be induced by stressing climates, by extreme states of the individual, an idea which is underlined formally by means of the markedly asymmetrical balance of the composition and the use of a blackened palette, as well as through the large dripping rolling down in the form of a stain that covers up the characters displayed until it reaches the bottom of the canvas. If I had to choose two terms to describe the visuality of this painting, I would choose sadness and uneasiness. It is no doubt a heartrending image. Heartrending and beautiful, all in one. A great piece.

It is revealing that those beings seem to be some sort of puppets, their human condition somewhat hard to elucidate. They are all analogous to one another: their faces are vague, imprecise –which makes them even more interesting.

In certain other works the climate is somewhat more poetic, happier if you wish. An example is Dicen que en la luna viven conejos / They say there are rabbits on the moon, a piece of extraordinary beauty and minimalism. The ambiguity of the “rabbit” motif as an almost abstract image, combined with the mythical and folk fabulistic implication of the title, as well as the broad green plane (a symbol of hope, among other connotations) spread out in the background, are perhaps attempts to guide the reading toward the intrinsically evanescent, ungraspable bias of all utopian thinking. Nonetheless, the work advocates the pertinence of dreams, the beauty of human illusions, of the yearning to transcend.

Epilogue
By now Little Red Ridinghood has already reached adulthood; Zorro has dislodged the excreta from his footwear, is healthy (without hepatitis) and fully trained to undertake his new “actions”. His date has also been a success. However, the Christmas gathering had an abrupt, unexpected end, and the pasture was not enough to satiate the appetite of all the sheep. And we still do not know whether there are rabbits on the moon.

Only Noel knows…

Píter Ortega Núñez
Curator, editor and art critic
B.A. in Art History from the University of Havana in July 2006