• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 09 / 14 / 2010

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09/12/2010. Havana’s Bertolt Brecht Cultural Center has a unique space: the Raúl Oliva Gallery.

The particularity of Bertolt Brecht resides in that it promotes and exhibits stage designs in its room and also functions as a Center for Studies in Scenic Design in Cuba. In order to reconstruct the story of Cuban scenery, exhibitions have been developed of masters such as Raúl Oliva, Eduardo Arrocha, María Elena Molinet and Salvador Fernández.

And more recently the Zenén Calero exhibition, Un retablo entre el sol y la luna, has been inaugurated, with master curator Silvia Llanes, invited by the Servando Cabrera Moreno Museum Library and with the words of the catalogue in the care of playwright Norge Espinosa Mendoza.

With the exhibition Zenén Calero - director of El Retablo Gallery and the Puppet Image Promotion Center in Matanzas - who has worked for over 30 years not only in that artistic expression, but also in the theatrical, comes to light.

To enter that room is to embrace works and personages, while sketches, costumes, characters and stage designs for shows – performed between 1982 and 2009 – point to an imaginative and talented artist. Calero creates textures, lines, volumes, reinventing space and taking possession of the characters of the stories. The world that is born from his hands is distinguished by a marked Cuban identity. The characters appear to have feelings; their features convey the full range of sensations of the work to which they belong.

Arlequín, Polichinela, el Soldado, Pierrot, la Muñeca bailarina and Pelusín del Monte resemble tiny people capable of taking us on a beautiful voyage to the tableaux.

The Cuban artist borrows stories from the Dane Hans Christian Andersen, Spaniards Juan Ramón Jiménez and Federico García Lorce, Germans Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, as well as from Cubans José Martí and Dora Alonso, to create images that impact beyond measure on the public.

African legends also appear in Zenén’s designs, among them The Great Banquet, The Ibeyis and the Devil, Ayapá’s Drum, Okin eiye ayé and Nokán and the Maize, with which he pays tribute to popular Cuban culture, with either an «evocation of popular rag dolls» or by tackling a component of Cuban culture.

The artist’s universe is very extensive, with a special atmosphere that includes designing costumes for the actors, masks, scenery and lighting. Zenén Calero’s exhibition, Un retablo entre el sol y la luna, establishes a new and higher challenge for future exhibitions.

Museographic design and performance, united in the eye-catching sketches, costumes, characters and stage designs for shows by Zenén Calero, turn the offer into an intelligent and magical walk through the scenery.
Upon appreciating the exhibition Un retablo…, those in attendance are impacted in such a way that they do not know if they have seen theatre and design… or vice versa.

By Kaly Smith Llanes
 
Source: Cubanow.net