Editorial Reviews

The Signs Pile Up: Paintings by Pedro Álvarez is the first comprehensive book to survey the work of this Cuban artist. Álvarez has shown his paintings in museums around the world, including the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Museo Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain,
the Arizona State University Museum of Art in Tempe, Arizona and the Museum of Art in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The catalog includes four essays which examine much of Álvarez s career - the Periodo Especial, the Dollarscape series, his use of American cars from the 1950s drawing on the complicated U.S.-Cuba relations, and identity issues. Much of his work utilized a juxtaposition of pop culture references, such as clippings from The Simpsons comic books, against traditional Cuban images, such as 19th century peasants and troubadours. Describing his creative process, Álvarez said, The iconography in my paintings is a collage of found images. Clips from art catalogs, magazines, books, old postcards, bank notes are intuitively collected and stocked for some time until they are used, in a more or less fragmentary way, as backgrounds, characters or plain referents. It is a process very close to the one described in Freud s studies on jokes. I have to be half way through those clips and into the realm of ideas, concerns and intuitions. From that tension, the new ideas are born. The execution phase has its own rhythm and tensions, but in a general sense, the majority of the important decisions has already been taken before painting starts.