MOTHERLAND BLUES — META MIAMI

“The motherland is the country in which you or your ancestors were born and to which you still feel emotionally linked, even if you live somewhere else.”

— unknown

Motherland Blues. WALDO BALART | JORGE CAMACHO | MANUEL PARDO

September 27th 2022

META Miami and Henrique Faría New York are pleased to present MOTHERLAND BLUES

Waldo Balart | Jorge Camacho | Manuel Pardo

The motherland is the country where you or your ancestors were born, and you still feel emotionally linked, even if you live elsewhere.

Human Exodus is increasing in numbers and geographies. Vulnerable people risk their lives on dangerous migration routes.

Our first edition of Motherland Blues features a selection of works in different media by three historic Cuban artists who fled Castro's Cuba during varying times of the regime.

Waldo Balart was born in Banes, in the northwestern province of Holguín in Cuba, in 1931. He grew up in a family with political history. In 1959, due to the communist revolution, he migrated to the United States. In the bohemian New York of the 60s, Balart truly comes into contact with art. He took classes at the school of the Museum of Modern Art and showed at the experimental Park Place Gallery, a space that became a catalyst for artists of the "hard edge" movement, later on, labeled as Minimalism. During those years in NY, he met the likes of Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, and Mark di Suvero. The 60s also marked the rise of Pop Art, which led Balart to cultivate a friendship with Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated on two films. The young artist did not lean toward the Pop trend. Instead, his interests were in a geometric style loosely called Op Art, Constructivist, or Concrete Art. For Balart, Concrete Art remains an ideal for personal liberation. He always favored abstraction in his quest for a foundation on which to grow his rigorous ethical-aesthetical compromise. "I have an ethical commitment to life which I fulfill through aesthetics. Rigor and discipline provide me with form and structure, and color with fantasy," he asserts.

Balart held his first exhibition in 1961 at the RJ Gallery in New York. In 1964, he was included in the mythical Bonino Gallery show Magnet. In 1968, he had a solo show at the well-known Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. He also participated in the first Bienal de Grabado in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Some of the paintings presented in this exhibition were part of another solo exhibition he held at Cisneros Gallery in New York in 1969. He moved from New York to Madrid in 1970. In 1972, Balart had a solo show at the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid. He has had some 50 solo exhibitions and over 150 group shows. in Europe and North and South America. Aside from being an artist, Balart has also published books and essays. Some of his publications include The Practice of Concrete Art: The European Society's Path Toward Knowledge (2011) and a collection of essays that were published throughout Europe known as Essays About Art (1993). He currently lives and works in Madrid. His works are part of public and private collections in Europe and North and South America.

Waldo Balart has pointed out; "art has proven that universal beauty does not stem from the specific qualities of the shape, but rather from the dynamic rhythm of its intrinsic associations or the mutual relations of the shapes in a composition." In the works by Balart on view at Motherland Blues, it is evident that from the very beginning of Balart's career as an artist, color was one of the primary building blocks of his creative process can therefore be seen as an architectural component of any given composition.

Manuel Pardo immigrated to the United States from Cuba in 1962, as part of Operation Peter Pan, at age ten. Operation Peter Pan (Operación Pedro Pan) was a clandestine exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors, ages 6 to 18, to the United States over two years from 1960 to 1962. The operation was the most significant exodus of minor refugees in the Western Hemisphere at the time. They were sent to the US after parents feared that Fidel Castro and the Communist party were planning to terminate parental rights and place minors in communist indoctrination centers.

In 1978 Pardo received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The artist's work was first exhibited in 1985 as part of a group exhibition held at The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art in New York, which Susana Torruela Leval organized. His first major one-person exhibition, titled Late 20th Century Still Lifes, was held at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1991 and curated by the museum's founding director Marcia Tucker. Drawing from pop culture and fine art references, Pardo developed a unique figurative style hinged upon flat colors and used a handcrafted line, usually in graphite, to create his paintings. He routinely worked in a series of repeated images with slight variations. Just beyond the sensual appeal in Pardo's paintings and drawings are pointed references to gender, mortality, race, and other issues regarding the human condition.

This exhibition features works from different series. When Manuel Pardo left Cuba as a child, all he took with him were memories of the Caribbean isle of paradise. In his series of paintings titled "The Motherland," one of Pardo's most emblematic ones, he transformed these memories into a symbolic landscape of palm trees and mountains. These dream-like landscapes are a tribute to his homeland. "Frenesí - Tabletop Mulatas" is a series of portraits about gender and transforming clichés into the iconography of his art. They are variations of the same carefully posed and idealized women/transgender men with elaborate hairdos. These generic women are, in fact, a link to one of Pardo's series of paintings titled "Mother and I," a tribute to the artist's mother who sacrificed everything to see her children escape the Castro dictatorship. Pardo's mother, Gladys, joined him and his sister in New York two years after they immigrated. "The Daisy" paintings are representative of what was Pardo's mother's era. When he was growing up in New York as a teenager, the flower power era of the 60s was alive. His mother wore chemise-style dresses and always had a small daisy motif on the print. The image of the daisy mainly describes his mother's adult life.

As Gérard Goodrow, curator, author, and former Director of Contemporary Art for Christie's in London has pointed out, "All of Pardo's works are concerned with deconstructing or breaking down stereotypes and prejudices."

Pardo has had numerous solo exhibitions, and his work has been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, and Mexico.

Jorge Camacho is an established Cuban artist that works in the surrealist style. His art is influenced by painters such as Tamayo, Miró, Bacon, Tanguy, and Wifredo Lam, who played a large part in his childhood. He belongs to the Third Generation of Cuban painters, who, like other artists of his generation, developed ideas of the abstract that would impact the world.

On his trip to Paris in 1959, Andre Breton invited him to participate in surrealist gatherings and activities. In 1967 he returned to Cuba to work at el Salon de Mayo. During his stay in Cuba, he met Reinaldo Arenas and launched a solo exhibition. Driven by a spirit always thirsty for knowledge, he began studying alchemy upon his return to Europe. This experience would later be reflected in his work and his study of birds, music, and literature.

Jorge Camacho, with the perfect treatment of line and color, develops paintings that nurture the profound elements rooted in his unconscious, a sum of traditions and distinctive Latin American cultural rituals and traits.

With a precise use of line and color, Jorge Camacho creates paintings that address Latin American traditions and cultures. He uses bony figures and totem pole-like structures to represent the elements of mystery and symbolism involved in Latin American rituals.

"Latin American Migration, Once Limited to a Few Countries Turns Into a Mass Exodus." WSJ, May 2022

""…The number of Cubans attempting to illegally cross the southern US border this year is projected to reach 150,000 individuals, surpassing levels during the crisis of the '80s and '90s" Universidad de Navarra, April 2022

"Arrests along U.S.-Mexico border-top 2 million a year for the first time" Texas Tribune, June 2022