Global Caribbean II

Contemporary Caribbean artists consciously reinvent and reassess themselves from the primordial manifestations of their people, exposed to the avant-garde at a global level, they create their own art, authentic, capable of causing us to look inward and to establish the transcendence of our difference, even through the most abstract or minimalist symbolic elaboration of their own ethno-genetic "unidiversity" of the same self-defining cultural contradictions …

Those of José Garcia Cordero (1951), Edouard Duval-Carrié (1954) and José Bedia (1959) are three visual universes capable of allowing a "spectroscopic" reading of the contemporary Caribbean polysynthesis. It is a matter of three auto-significant esthetic proposals ideologically linked, not only through some objective contents in which underlie traditional imagery sources or through some conceptual resolutions that proclaim their vital transmutation of the more radical poetics of the western artistic modernism, without forgetting the 'West Indian surrealism' and the reflexive post-expressionism that, at first instance, especially mark each one of their poly-phase symbolic creations.

The recent productions of Duval-Carrié, Garcia Cordero and Bedia bring us face to face with three eminently reflexive and ethical creative methods. Their respective metaphorical repertoires explode and dialogue as a mirror of a singular sensibility and a single compromisingly identifying discourse. Rebellious, clear, mystical, thaumaturgies of dreams and vigil…  A playful-speculative temperament distinguishes and links in a crystalline and enigmatic way these three creators and carries them to materialize their images from their particular transmutations and appreciation of the ancient symbols, as well as from their intimate visions of the chaotic postmodernist rituals, the feel for the land, the escape-migration and return, the magic, the memory, the sociopolitical absurdities and the amazing daily routine of the insular reality.

Amable Lopez Melendez, AICA/ADCA

Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

English translation by Sandy Garcia