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Between the Moon and a Golf Ball. Incursioni nell’immaginario di Tonel

 

Giacomo Zaza

 

 

Tonel’s (Antonio Eligio Fernández) exhibition, Between the Moon and a Golf Ball. Drawings and Installations, at the Galleria Massimo Ligreggi in Catania, presents an important nucleus of works that highlights an articulated frequentation of history and memory, both collective and personal. This nucleus brings together drawings and installations that contain references and allusions to the Cold War period, between the middle and the end of the last century. And they construct an unusual representational relationship with the world.

Massaguer, to Rafael Fornés and Santiago Armada (Chago), this wide-ranging production brings with it an archipelago of questions: the themes of male and female, individual and community, the subversion of machismo (associated with the Cuban Revolution), the global economy and neoliberalism in the midst of financial crises and the vagaries of stock markets. It questions the link between scientific/material progress and ethical/moral progress, and issues related to the widespread need for security in our times, as well as the perennial formation of ‘imperialisms’.

Moreover, while the humorous and parodistic emphasis of Tonel’s drawings made with ink on paper (sometimes also with watercolour and acrylic) is in tune with the potential of genre cartoons related to the social psychology of the Cuban people and, above all, of political satire (a wide experience ranging from the character “El Bobo” drawn by Eduardo Abela, who embodied the civil conscience of the Cuban nation under Gerardo Machado, to the socio-political chronicle of the humorous supplement “Dedeté”, founded in 1969, which featured José Luis Posada, Carlos Julio Villar (Carlucho), Alberto Morales (Ajubel), and many others). On the other hand, his thematic multiverse goes beyond the field of cartoons and satire in favour of an open imaginary space-time without boundaries or stylistic labels: a space in which Tonel’s multimedia artistic practice continuously questions our mental structures. Perhaps the ironic characters of the artist’s drawings are the visual transfiguration of that Cuban oral transmission which, through “choteo”, double meanings and artificial narrative solutions, has told stories of various kinds about the vicissitudes of the island and the representation of the world. Tonel’s irreverent attitude is certainly evident, reconsidering the space of satire as an act of reflection – a position that is far removed from the usual exercise of graphic humour in vogue in Cuban magazines since the 1980s. For the artist, both the line of the drawing and the concept count (guides inherited from Chago’s subversive sign). Line and concept are indispensable to conceive visual glimpses that disarticulate schemes and shake up any form of statism. However, the commentary is not explicitly direct, but subtle and elliptical, hovering between irony and cynicism.

Another salient aspect. The scenes and characters drawn by Tonel avoid the grandiloquence with which stories are usually told. Their narrative charge, of subjective matrix, brings to the fore portraits of otherness and questioning approaches to diplomacy, power, money, the marginal or the vernacular, to the “high” and “low” zones of culture. It is a narrative vision inspired by political contexts but with a predilection for the historiographic approach. In fact, the artist, born in Havana in 1958, incorporates the (lived) experience of the “capitulation” of the Soviet Union followed by the weakening of the opposition between the US and USSR blocs. At the same time he ‘introjects’ the traumas of the ‘Período Especial en Tiempos de paz’ in Cuba in the early 1990s – a difficult time of austerity, rationing and economic cuts.

Towards the end of the 1980s Tonel began an intermedial journey (drawings, artist’s books, installations with bricks and cement blocks, object assemblages, wooden sculptures) that was never linear, producing symbolic deviations, playful, parodic scenarios, but also polysemic poetic associations. In this journey, multiple reflections emerge on socialist utopias (an iconographic repertoire imbued with references to communism and neoliberalism) and geopolitical blocs, as well as on the extension of global trade and space exploration (often transformed into military domination). Tonel’s interests in Soviet and American space programmes (such as the Russian ‘Soyuz’ and US ‘Apollo’ missions) emerge. However, in the works where one perceives a fascination with the scientific exploration/experimentation of the cosmos, Tonel’s image is totally detached from the significance of the strategic domination of the outer atmosphere that the great powers aimed for (and perhaps still aim for). The figures of astronauts that appear in his works – that of Jurij Alekseevič Gagarin (the first cosmonaut on a patrol in 1961) in the company of the dog Laika (the first living being launched – or rather sacrificed – into orbit in 1957), suspended above Russian maritime traffic – are foreign to the perverse purpose of propaganda, indeed they happily express only the fantasy that was built around the exceptionality of events in space. Tonel shuffles historical-iconographic sources to create moon landing scenes that feature not only Soviet cosmonauts and space robots, but also golfers, golf carts (in Lunokhod 2, 2009) and conveyor belts. Or he combines political figures (Stalin) with fictional characters from the world of fairy tales (Little Red Riding Hood) or comic books (Superman).

 

For the artist, golfers are a metaphor for affluence: a lifestyle undisturbed by the turbulence of reality. Golf alludes to the pastime of men who hold and exercise power, politicians and businessmen. The depiction of the golfer in black ink on the white paper appears permeable and aerial, lacking consistency. It seems to express a sense of immateriality – probably the same as in the cosmos. Thus in the suspension of the characters and symbolic objects there is a fanciful abstraction of power that dematerialises the seriousness of financial discourse and the yearning for conquest.

The golfers in the vacuum of space imagined by Tonel, or the conveyor belt in action between the Earth and the Moon – in Earth Moon Box (Cosmic Trade), 2008 – are the idea of new gravity-defying processes. Several works allude to the uncontrolled expansion of networks that connect nations, regions, continents and even the earth and other bodies in outer space. Some show purely invented algorithms, imbued with humour, inspired by the charts of financial markets and cross-border trade. But, beyond the signs and symbols referring to global trade, Tonel is predominant, as we see in the exhibition at the Ligreggi Gallery in Catania, in the icon of the political figure, promoter of diplomatic communities that determine shared orientations and thoughts. In fact, from historiographic territory the artist reactivates the motives of complicity and political confrontation. His installation Amistad [Friendship], 2014, takes as its starting point the account of a trip made by Fidel Castro in 1977 to various African countries, in an attempt to open up the influence of the Cuban communist order on Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, etc.. Tonel examines the English transcript of conversations that took place in East Berlin, on 3 April 1977 at the SED Central Committee House, between Fidel Castro and Erich Honecker, former president of the DDR (the former German Democratic Republic, 1949-1990, of Communist Germany): here Castro talks about his trip to Africa expressing personal views about the political framework of southern Africa and the African leaders he met (such as Agostinho Neto, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Samora Machel), dwelling on guerrilla or liberation groups such as the African National Congress (ANC) or the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). This historical trace noted by Tonel in Amistad underlines the confluence of Castro’s political interests towards Africa. On the other hand, one should not forget Cuba’s internationalist policy and its participation in anti-colonial wars in Africa, as well as the “Tricontinental” conference (1966) in which delegates of liberation movements from 82 nations met in Havana to form an alliance (against imperialism) called “Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America”. Tonel’s work echoes Cuba’s embrace of African-American political exiles and the long military service spent by thousands of Cubans in Angola, and even Ethiopia. Here the portraits of political leaders become a roundup of human beings who have had an exchange, a contact, a convergence of ideas. They compose a chorus of ideological affinities.

Tonel clearly underlines the thematic choices inherent in a climate experienced first-hand: “My vision of the Cold War is a very personal one, informed by the fact that I was born and raised in Havana, Cuba, at a time when my country was involved in this conflict, first when the revolutionary leadership directly confronted American domination in the Western Hemisphere, and later when that same leadership embraced communism as a state ideology and decided to align itself internationally with the Soviet Union. This crucial period of contemporary history is part of my biography; it is something I have lived and experienced first-hand in a very specific, even intimate way, as a person living in a Caribbean and Latin American culture, who will go through his formative years in a context defined by the ideological proximity between Cuba and the entire bloc dominated by the Soviet Union, as well as the close ties between Cuba and many of the nations of the so-called Third World”. The imagery practised by Tonel combines documents and fiction, historical data and interpretations, to put into circulation a narrative that wanders between the events and personalities of History or in the unstable and disjointed environment of the “new capitalism” (new geography of power that radiates everywhere through the extension of production, markets, finance, and new technologies). In the cognitive and perceptive space of this narrative, the representation of a wandering subject who relates to the Other and to the world often emerges. Therefore, the incursion into Tonel’s imagery, observed on the basis of our conformity or dissimilarity to a previous scheme (cultural imprinting), always leads us to the full freedom of visual thought, anarchic and propulsive, never rhetorical. And through the appropriation, interpretation and manipulation (between fiction and reality) of history, it invites us to recognise ourselves beyond investiture, human ideals and cultural impulses, bearing in mind that “fiction is a vast field of experimentation for the work of identification that we carry out on ourselves” (Paul Ricoeur). In the work Antonios. (A self-portrait with Gramsci), 2021, reworked for the Catania event, Tonel wants to reveal the data of his identity starting from a story about a memory that is not only (self)biographical but also intertwined with that of Antonio Gramsci. In the installation, photocopies, photographs, texts and letters between Gramsci and his family from prison are displayed on the walls. On closer inspection, this documentation, e.g. photos of Gramsci’s wife with their two children, interpenetrates with some photos and texts that talk about the life and history of Tonel’s family (his father, his son, his connections, etc.). Tonel turns to the personality of Antonio Gramsci to court the idea of “a diffuse intellectuality”, not separated “by profession and class affiliation from the rest of society”.

Far from social conformity, Tonel merely imagines a relationship (emotional, intellectual, political) of an individual with a related cultural personality. The idea of a journey remains, from the body of the individual and personal space towards a shared body, such as the body of the nation, or towards a celestial body or a being of global space.

 

 

© Giacomo Zaza. 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

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