|
Having just arrived from a small village in the mountains of Cuba, I was awed by the masses of people who flowed through the streets of the majestic capital of Havana, streets rich in architecture and concepts, pregnant with that which I was not accustomed to seeing. These multitudes, these crowds, these “human groups”, inspired me and gave birth to the essence of my creative work. For several years, I have worked with the social theme of “Human Groups”. While I have explored it in various paths, in various forms, and in various concepts, it has been the central motif and core of my artistic endeavors. Then, one metropolis after another, each one with its specifics, with its own spirit, but all with their similarities, all with their human groups, spoke to me, all insisting on their own existence, insisting that I not forget this theme, incomprehensible in its infiniteness. Now I find myself here, in a small city in North Carolina, whose landscape and people remind me of the village where I was born and thus help me to prevail, as crowds prevail. While I try to capture all the quotidian and ordinary—such as the word “crowd” itself—I am compelled to transform it into something extraordinary and exceptional, to strip it of its dismal and dreary meaning, modestly reflecting that which I have lived and with which I have lived, that which is familiar to me, that which I know: That universe full of simplicities alongside complexities; that common reality which does not deny individuality; that crowd, disoriented and confounded, which persists in a frozen wait whose end no one can predict; that multitude, always looking towards an uncertain horizon, distant and dark, without details, revealing the uncertainty of that which they watch and wait for, of that which they say or could speak to, still, like mutes, in a silent, grey atmosphere, but illuminated by a shining ray of hope. –Raul Montero |