Glexis
Novoa’s
Dystopic Futurism
Alfredo Triff
Since the famous Roman Vitruvius’s treatise “On Architecture,” we
think of designing buildings as the paradigm of human reason and order
against chaos. Yet history shows that order may be a pause amid longer
periods of human-caused chaos. If architecture could stand like the mark
of human endeavor, perhaps history looks more like layers of civilization
buried under the boot of the chaos.
In modern times, ideas of civic freedoms have always been at odds with
the calculations of political power. Throughout the 20th century, human
autonomy was annihilated by different übermensch utopias.
Putting ideology over rights and terror over truth, dictatorships from
the right
and left sanctioned their control with huge mausoleums, endless avenues,
monstrous buildings, and jingoistic statuary.
Glexis Novoa, one of the most important Cuban artists of the so-called
Eighties generation –that first group to have been born and raised
after the revolution– likes to reminds us that terror is always present.
His voice is that of the skeptic who makes us ponder if our civilization
is an accident instead of the cause of progress.
Novoa –who came to Miami via Mexico in the mid-Nineties– belongs
to a group of Cuban artists disillusioned with Communism but aware of today’s
deceiving political discourse. From his first Miami show, “La Habana
Oscura” (Dark Havana), at Ambrosino Gallery,
which depicted the Cuban capital as a cold and cruel place, to his post
9/11 show "New Works" at
Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in December
2003, Novoa keeps his vision in synch with world events.
This artist’s interest in architecture goes back to his childhood,
when in the company of his mother they would sightsee in Havana’s
historic district. Novoa was also curious about ideological symbols, which
he explored during the 1980’s when he produced ironic, Constructivist-like
agitprop art. It was just a matter of time until these pseudo-patriotic
messages in placards, flags, and slogans turned into a structure with a
geometric perspective.
While in Mexico in the early 1990’s, Novoa felt akin to Tomás
Sánchez’s treatment of the landscape (though Sánchez’s
trade is the country not the metropolis). Later, he fixed his attention
on the often-ignored, detailed background renditions of the Flemish masters’ paintings
and engravings. Add to this Eduard Baldus’ photos, Escher, and American
pop –plus all architectural styles enamored with power– and
you get an idea of Novoa’s influences.
Why the city? Because since the Industrial Revolution, the city has become
Totalitarianism’s center where modern utopias such as Marxism-Leninism,
Fascism, and Nazism found a core for the state’s expansion and surveillance.
Novoa’s work articulates this aesthetic of power, expressed through
the urban landscape.
Let’s take the idea of order. Throughout the 20th century, architectural
order has been implicitly political. Totalitarianism conveys the idea that
the worst tribulations of our present are justified in light of a promising
future. This future and its result, the New Man, was Cuban Communism’s
main motto for the past four decades and the promise became a caricature,
an essential element in Novoa’s art.
See Novoa’s Escher-like panoramas of futuristic hyper-reality, where
triangle and cube are the core of imaginary constructions. From above the
roofs we observe pointed towers and ring-shape forms, highlighting huge
slabs of truncated solid mass. Absolutely empty of human presence, these
cityscapes evoke a desolate abstraction in which life is transformed into
concrete and marble.
Drawing –not painting– these possible worlds is what interests
Novoa, a perspective virtuoso who indulges in a practice considered second
to painting and passed along (since the Renaissance) to the architecture
profession. His pulse is careful and precise and his fantastic images are
realistic and obtained in extremely small detail.
Glexis Novoa elaborates visions reminiscent of science fiction. I can recollect
some of his futuristic ziggurats with converging stairs leading to needle-shape
obelisks evoking the buildings of ancient sacrifice. This is where political –not
just religious– rites take place. As Georges Bataille concluded,
monumental architecture (buildings, statuary, roads) is the stage for the
ritual, but eventually it becomes sacred itself.
One may think that Novoa’ s work is ominously serious, but there’s
plenty of irony and cartooning and he lampoons with gusto the straight-faced
ritual of patriotic pomposity. In a work from 1999, Motherland Proudly
Watches, Novoa played with a verse from the
Cuban national anthem and explored the political biography of this century.
Against the profile of a statue with a sword in hand –a replica of
the Motherland Memorial in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad)– we distinguished
a sea-horizon dotted with words, fragments, statements, and punctuation
signs. The Promised Land (America) is also not paradise. This new place
has its own version of control, which is in some ways a more insidious
machine. Motherland Proudly Watches turned
the myth of exile upside down; the tradeoff between hopes and reality.
Novoa’s first work on marble was Inundaciones 2000,
a permanent 84-feet long site-specific drawing at Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de
Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain. I find something
intractably romantic in Novoa's vision who after a 500 years tradition
of drawing on paper, decides to draw on
marble, an ideal medium for a messier art form, sculpture.
In 2001 at MAM, Novoa unveiled Untitled, his
version of the universal utopia’s
hecatomb. The earth’s ice has melted and all that’s left is
a little continent drifting away, inhabited by survivors who live off some
kind of submarine recycling. The island contains the wreckage of our industrial
civilization plus the iconoclastic ruins of the modern architectural canon.
It all becomes the artist’s suggestion of a possible, though not
yet actual, future: A different history being "drawn" after the
end of the world. Or is it in between civilizations?
Since 9/11 Novoa has started depicting marginal Expressionist perspectives
of a ruinous global village; a mix of all the histories one can muster
in one big spectacle. His pictorial foresight comes close to Paul Virilio.
In his essay "The Overexposed City," Virilio
leaves open the possibility that architecture will simply become another
way of dominating the planet by destroying the urban environment. Novoa
goes past this moment, when the planet has already been obliterated.
An example is Europa, a work from 2003 at the Bernice Steinbaum
Gallery.
The piece showed a multicultural, postcolonial EU just before the forces
of fundamentalism win over, the fulfilled prophesy of
Al-Qaeda. A makeshift war campsite, the sky filled with huge eyeball surveillance
machines, domes of all kinds, minarets, gothic towers, spires displaying
thin flags, as if in some unlikely Christian/Islamic HQ. Who and where
is the enemy? Inside itself, amorphous, plotting destruction.
The end of history may not be the final synthesis of a great unfolding –neither
utopia nor dystopia. Not a whimper, not a bang. What is there after the
end? Another beginning?
In "Approaches to Nothingness," Edgar Morin explores the idea
that death does not mean the destruction of our bodies, because at some
point our selves can end up in the equivalent of some supercomputer's hard
drive. This is the awareness of one who has already disappeared. Perhaps
Novoa hints at the oblivion of our collective memories; if we ever come
back we will repeat the same mistake all over again –which, as we
know, has already happened.
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