For centuries women have been present in the visual arts: the primitive prehistoric Venus, symbol of fertility, the virgins of the Baroque or the dancers taken to canvas by the impressionists, women are always constructed as an object of artistic representation. However, this representation did not come from the innocent subjectivity of the artist or from reality, since the way of approaching the feminine image in any social practice is entirely linked to the pre-established roles associated with women of a certain culture, time and place.
The woman has been then, from antiquity to the Vanguards, the object of the androcentric gaze, with her naked and perfect body in accordance with the beauty canons of each era. Numerous stereotypes define them historically, ranging from the image of the saint to that of the witch, as antagonistic extremes.
People say that art is freedom. For the women of the world, this is how it has been throughout history: they have gone from being spectators to being muses and then artists, looking for equal opportunities.
Every year in the month of March we meet in exhibitions of women artists, this does not mean a tradition but a valid recognition of female creation from Pinar del Río around love and art. In order to reflect on the role of women in the artistic field, the Arturo Regueiro gallery calls for the presence of female artists in its exhibition proposals as recognition a the participation of women in Cuban art, not only because it is a voice that should not be silenced or because men and women are part of the same team, but also because of the immense creative value of the works and the reflections they can generate in the viewer.
The artist and writer from Palacio Fabiola González Díaz, -graduated from the Carlos Hidalgo Professional School of Plastic Arts in 2004- has traveled silently and timidly through the local exhibition stages; she broke into performance as an expressive mode in her first creative stage, today she returns after a few years away from the city of Pinar del Río to give us her last personal exhibition made up of sixteen paintings on canvas that narrate her personal stories through of the relationship between emotions and art; portraits that crowd together as reminders underlining that feelings and inspiration are the fuel of contemporary artistic expression.
The social problems interpreted and identified with the context, identity and gender are recurring reflections In his abundant plastic production, eroticism, the theme chosen for his occasional aesthetic discourse, makes us reflect on reality itself and on the influence of the social environment on art and life.
The expressive and rebellious character of his work in the current reality, his practice and thought, have delivered an inalienable world of possibilities to his most recent artistic achievement. From her personal experience, she relies on family scenes and expressive tools that make visible the need for female empowerment with the aim of transforming patriarchal society from the exercise of representation of reality from the borders of private and public space.
Creating involves many emotions, pleasure and pain. Fabiola’s art is presented as the most sincere wish that each cup overflows with rich and eternal blessings so that each path leads to inclusion and peace.
EmPoderArte. intimate collagebecomes a very interesting visual and social testimony that deserves to be evaluated in its proper institutional dimension, valuing artistic creation as a social commitment and reflection of the cultural spirit of an era marked by visual discourses with gender themes, as well as the emergence of a new Feminine culture in the visual arts.
The truth is that his art goes beyond the realization of pictures that adorn the wall. The creation of it is knowledge. It is that small surface that snatches away from reality to combine personal emotions and ideas with those of society.
His pictorial and literary themes add imagination and craft; scenes, actions or processes that speak of who we are individually, as a gender and as human beings. González Díaz’s art, although it can be fun, is something serious, especially for those of us who have the duty to change reality and reflect on the context.
With this personal exhibition at the Arturo Regueiro gallery, in an attempt to survive, the author plays with her most naive self, embarking on a journey from childhood as deeper offerings to the peaks of classical myth. She thus manages to notice the fictions that will leave her mutilated in the modern garden of Eden. History is full of exceptional women, even if sometimes they are not known as they deserve. Scientists, artists, peasant women, queens… and poets, creators of images that reflect who we are and outline what we want to be.
From an elegant poetic line his paintings have an evolutionary attitude, his compositions generate beauty, artistic creation for thought; he skilfully delves into a code of metaphysical and cosmic knowledge from the interpretation of his own images and daily experiences. His nudes remind us of the gods of the Mediterranean and transmute them to our insular and Caribbean dream.
What is that woman waiting for?, Fever of Light, Fighter, Banished, Abandoned, From This Shore, Broken Doll, The New Adam, are observatory themes of how glass fragments and light penetrates through colored stained glass windows, proposing particularities of the woman’s experience, in a position where it is not the pain and dramas of sexuality that define the theoretical springs of the discourse, but a more centered and expanded subjectivity starting from itself; where “the other” is not placed from the drama of exclusion, indifference and silence.
In her world of wonders in the beautiful rural landscape of San Diego de los Baños, a Goddess is born to gather the portraits of many women’s stories, where the masks and the mirror are not enough to break the molds, because their perception of themselves and their peers obey the paradigms of femininity of their societies, subject to masculine idiosyncrasies.
The author autobiographies herself with a palette loaded with attractive colors: she breaks into the world of art and culture, with her own gaze and sensitivity, channeling fertile ground and creating alternate zones of meaning generation, which causes a subject that does not affiliates with the inherited conditions and establishes itself to meet again at the threshold of dawn.
