Photos by Brian Addison.
Cuban artist Esterio Segura has an obsession with planes and the many metaphors attached to them. For him, the flying transporters represent freedom, migration, progress, change, and the capacity of human capability.
In his first solo US exhibition to date, untitled and now being showcased at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), the sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker, and photographer shows off his not-so-subtle jabs at being critical of his government as well as the disparity between the haves and have-nots.
Coming to notoriety in the early 90s with his piece Santo de paseo por el trópico—an polychrome plaster sculpture which shows a Saint Sebastian with three Cuban machetes jabbed into him as he peruses a field of tropic greens—Segura is not a stranger to controversy.
In a piece at MOLAA appropriately titled Not Flying, a fiberglass sculpture of Pinocchio—in “real boy” form—a large plan as his nose, sits in a cage while looking up with his hands behind his back. Another Pinocchio sculpture, arguably the exhibit’s centerpiece, offers the same pose by the character, with his nose exorbitantly long and thin with a tiny plane on its tip. And yet another Pinocchio, his nose becoming a rope that entangles his left leg while he stands on a pile of books.
The pieces, often showing off the discrepancy between combining religious and commercial practices, centers of power versus the individual, isolation versus freedom, come with a heavy dose of gravity.
This, however, is not say that all manifestations of Segura’s work remain pejorative in nature; there is a beautiful sense of hope and a happy nod toward pop culture that surrounds the pieces.
“The references in Segura’s work are diverse,” said curator Raquel Carrera in a statement. “He enjoys moving from the popular to the conceptual, passing through Afro-Cuban, kitsch and pop references, religious iconography, art history, philosophy and concrete textual accounts. He utilizes these references as metaphors, visually combining them in his open-ended syncretism.”
Nothing exemplifies this more, perhaps, than the piece you see when entering the museum: Goodbye My Love, a giant red sculpture of a plane with the body of the plane a heart. You might recognize it from a massive installation that was placed in Times Square in 2011, when Segura was invited to hang many of the planes across the esplanade of the tourist center.
This MOLAA exhibit marks the first comprehensive survey of his work at a museum outside of Cuba since his 1999 exhibition Espacio ocupado por un Sueño at Centro Wifredo Lam in Havana.
The opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 22, from 7PM to 10PM, with Segura on hand. To RSVP for the event, email [email protected]. For more information, click here.