Yoel Lugones Vázquez
Lyricism in motion; sensuality typical of a dancer; The delicacy of each gesture and many other readings can be absorbed by those who enjoy "Inner Dance", an exhibition by Osvaldo García that reveres the world of ballet, and particularly the figure of Alicia Alonso.
Inaugurated at the Casa de la Obra Pía, in the Historic Center of Havana, the exhibition invites the fullest tasting, visually and spiritually, by translating into painting unique moments of dance art; moments that we perfectly enjoy on stage but that are now returned to us in color, in concern, in the spell of artistic truth.
Dancers that emerge from the oil painting as if they were in full dance action invade each work with rigorous detail. Thus they emerge from the wind, from the vegetation, from the moon ... They turned into swans, transmuted into another person, but women of flesh and blood who give all their grace.
The ethereal, the unattainable, that fleeting moment that is never repeated in a gesture, in an action, is what the artist has managed to grasp in his proposal. And it is that - as the critic Toni Piñera expresses in the words of the catalog of the exhibition - “painting the dance is something similar to reaching the sky with a wide lens that is directed, this time, to the skin inside the human being. Because what we see in the scene cannot be reached with the naked eye, because it is danced with the heart and soul, which leave trails in their wake. That is what Osvaldo García (Ogarc) collects in his current show «Inner Dance»: shreds of the spirit, breaths of a being transformed for us into something unreal that travels the space in search of a strange place, close to the dimension of the hidden, of what we know exists and we cannot catch. ”
The idea of approaching dance through painting, as Osvaldo confessed, arises from Alicia Alonso's 92nd birthday and her admiration for an artist whose vitality has been more than present throughout her life ; In addition, the theme of ballet attracts him because of the line that the dancer has and that she adopts in her positions: “That fascinates me, because my line is very sinuous, it plays with nooks and crannies and is always in motion, carrying strength and vitality, and all of that has a lot to do with dancing. ”
Something that characterizes "Inner Dance" is the color. García was interested, above all, in giving prestige to Alicia's work and that is why he did not want to touch, work with grays or too graphic themes as a cartoonist: “I wanted to do something more festive, more elegant. But in the future I plan to do more abstract things because my figuration starts from the human being, looking for the abstract and vice versa. It is a travel in the way that characterizes me. Even playing with other visions, with readings that I did not propose, that people see shapes, different figures than the ones I wanted to capture; playing with movement is something that interests me a lot. ”
Precisely, this theme will be taken up in future exhibitions by Osvaldo García, an artist who has been captivated by the “spirit of dance”.