Tony Montana, protagonist of Brian de Palma’s famous film “Scarface,” is a Cuban immigrant who escapes from the island during 1980’s historic Mariel boatlift. Once in Florida, the “marielito” of this story becomes a hired killer to obtain and pay for his green card. His ruthless and unscrupulous style quickly places Tony at the highest level of the cocaine mafia in Miami.
But the Tony Montana of the 1983 film, embodied by Al Pacino, outraged many Cuban exiles who felt that the film portrayed a negative and one-sided image of their community. In reality, few from the “Mariel generation” were a Tony Montana.
(LnS Gallery)
Cuban artist Carlos Alfonzo arrived in Miami through the Mariel boatlift.
An estimated 125,000 Cubans arrived via the Mariel-Havana Key West bridge, many of whom were everyday people hoping to find freedom and reunite with their families in the United States. Others were citizens who utterly disagreed with the politics, the ideology and abuses of the Castro regime.
What came out of this was a greatly diverse group of exceptional creators in the fields of literature, visual arts, poetry, music, journalism, academia and theater. They encompassed an intellectual movement with very peculiar characteristics that’s still being defined and studied today.
Artist Carlos Alfonzo is one of them.
(Sofia Guerra for LnS Gallery)
“Oyá” (1987), acrylic on panel, 47 1/2″ x 36,″ by Carlos Alfonzo.
Defying erasure and in the name of cultural justice, Coconut Grove’s LnS Gallery is presenting “Carlos Alfonzo: Legacy,” an exhibition worth the drive honoring the Cuban artist as a towering figure within the history of post-revolutionary art from Cuba and its diaspora. Alfonzo, who fled the Castro regime in 1980, died of AIDS in 1991 at age 40.
According to the gallery, among the works on display is “The City” (1989), a masterpiece that is being shown for the first time in almost two decades. The exhibition is made up of more than 13 works that could be considered a comprehensive survey of Alfonzo’s oeuvre.
Additionally, the show aims to celebrate the publication of a major monographic volume about the painter titled “Carlos Alfonzo: Late Paintings,” published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA) in conjunction with its exhibition at the Miami Design District museum between April and November 2022.
(Sofia Guerra for LnS Gallery)
“Untitled [Head] Witness” (1990), oil on canvas, 36″ x 30″ (L), and “Prayer 2” (1989), oil on canvas, 72″ x 72,″ will both be on view in “Carlos Alfonzo: Legacy” at the LnS Gallery.
“I curated Carlos Alfonzo’s show at ICA (in 2022),” said Gean Moreno, director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at ICA Miami, and part of the institution’s curatorial team. “It was an exhibition that just displayed the paintings produced by Alfonzo in the last 14 months of his life, before his passing – sometimes they are called ‘the black paintings’ or ‘the black period’ – and so, no work from before that (time frame) was presented then.”
(Sofia Guerra for LnS Gallery)
Carlos Alfonzo’s “The City” (1989) – oil on linen, three panels, 96″ x 252″ – is being shown publicly for the first time in two decades.
Moreno says the publication contains the black paintings and includes works from the rest of Alfonzo’s career: from drawings and sculptures he produced in Havana in the late 1970s to the dynamic compositions that brought him international recognition in the ’80s. According to Moreno, this is the first monograph dedicated to the artist in more than 25 years. Its contents fill a historical art gap with newly commissioned scholarship, materials drawn from archives and a comprehensive selection of paintings.
(LnS Gallery.com)
Sergio Cernuda, LnS Gallery Director
During the run of the show at LnS, “Carlos Alfonzo: Late Paintings,” will be for sale.
For gallery director Sergio Cernuda, his interest in Alfonzo’s work and his desire to better study the artist’s trajectory (and turn it into a historical archive) began a long time ago.
“Over the past 20 years, Carlos Alfonzo has become one of the most outstanding painters of the 1980s. In the short time that elapsed between his departure from Cuba during the Mariel exodus in 1980 and his premature death ... he generated a body of work that evolved coherently and that made constant references to his various interests, such as his relationship with life and death, his spirituality and mysticism, his relationship with literature and history, his vision of the spiral of time,” explained Cernuda. “This project fully highlights Alfonzo’s work in all the media that fascinated him: painting, sculpture and ceramics.”
The gallery owner says it is the generosity of Alfonzo’s collectors and the interest of institutions such as ICA that helped realize the exhibition at LnS.
“Most of the paintings we are showing at LnS are from that period of the mid-1980s that we have been able to gather due to a collaborative interest in preserving his legacy,” said Cernuda.
On examining Alfonzo’s body of work in 2024, Moreno assures us that the time was right.
“It’s been almost 25 years since the last time people [thought] about him in any serious way,” explained Moreno, “and it’s also a time when people are starting to think about the 1980s again. So, it’d be nice to rethink the 1980s and make it a bigger picture since artists like Alfonzo were maybe on the periphery in the ’80s. I think this is the time to do another rereading of his entire body of work.”
From the perspective of an Alfonzo appreciator, the work of this Cuban artist – born in Havana in 1950 – is an act of personal affection. Coral Gables art collector Jorge Pedroso says that in 1993 he organized and was part of the group of investors who bought the artist’s estate – with the idea of preserving the unity of the works that Alfonzo had left before his death.
“My wife and I had always been intrigued by Alfonzo’s work, but we didn’t know much about it,” explained Pedroso. “When I saw his work, I was very impressed. I think [Alfonzo] is, in my humble opinion, one of the most complete and talented artists that Cuba has produced in the last 50 years.”
Pedroso says that for many years he had in his possession an Alfonzo piece titled “Santa Lucía.” It was especially significant to him because it bore the same name as the sugar mill owned by his mother’s family and expropriated by Castro in the Cuban province of Oriente.
“It was a coincidence that that was one of Alfonzo’s favorite pieces,” he said.
For Cernuda, Alfonzo’s work is incredibly close to his own history.
“I’m a first-generation Cuban American,” he said. “Our gallery opened seven years ago, in February, the same month that Alfonzo passed away in 1991.”
The exhibition is a free experience now through April 13. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Friday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.; and Monday by appointment only. Call 305.987.5642 or visit LNSGallery.com.
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