SHAPES OF RESILIENCE: THE SOUL OF LATIN AMERICA IN ARNOLKIS TURRO AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY
I wandered into Arnolkis Turro’s exhibition by pure happenstance. Drawn initially to honour the late Luis Chacón at the Costa Rican National Gallery, where the Bocaraca Group had gathered to celebrate his legacy, I found myself pulled into a smaller room dedicated to Turro—a Cuban painter I hadn’t yet encountered. But the vast, monumental canvases in Trópicos Transitorios held me captive with their sheer complexity, originality, and beauty. His layered compositions, made up of large single panels or multi-part pieces, unfolded before me like a tapestry of dreamlike visions. I lost myself in the richness of his painted worlds, fascinated by rust magical flowers, spectral silhouettes, and proud horses interwoven with textures and designs echoing architectural elements.
Since my earliest memories, Cuban art has held me in its thrall. Each visit to the island, most recently in 2018, was a journey that led me deeper into the official and unseen realms of its painting and sculpture both celebrated and hidden. Over the years, I’ve collected paintings, both of known and undiscovered artists drawn by their magic. There is something in Cuban art that endlessly enchants me. Perhaps that’s why I lingered so long in the National Gallery, captivated by Turro’s creations, as if they held the heartbeat of a place I’ve come to cherish.
Born in Cuba, in 1978, Arnolkis Turro’s journey through the world of Latin American art is steeped in the textures and whispers of everyday life. His years at Havana’s National School of Plastic Arts ignited a deep-seated love for painting, drawing, and sculpture, guiding him across borders to share his vision in Cuba, the United States, Switzerland, Germany, Mexico, and especially in Spain, where he left his mark in the city of La Coruña.
Turro, now residing in Nicaragua, paints with an intensity that leaves no room for chance, constructing a poetic universe of chosen images that seem to pulse with intention. As Ernesto Menéndez-Conde notes, “Turro’s work is woven with chromatic chords, visual rhythms, and geometric motifs that emerge like leitmotifs across the canvas. In his work, a “heterogeneous poetic world” unfolds—a realm touched by childlike wonder and dreamlike roots, bursting forth in vivid chromatism, glazes, graffiti-like decompositions, and textures created from fibers, varnishes, and pigment pastes. His art invites the eye and spirit into a world that is both alluring and deeply contemplative, a poetic journey through landscapes both familiar and fantastical”.
Arnolkis Turro left Cuba at 21, each destination shaping him yet leaving him longing for the pulse of Latin America. A native of Guantanamo, he carries in his veins the land’s colours, scents, and profound cultural imprints. In the vibrant chaos of New York, he felt the pull of his heritage even stronger, the blend of Indigenous, Spanish, and African roots calling him back to the Americas. For Turro, Latin America’s landscapes—its volcanoes, lakes, and skies—are as essential as air, as central to his being as the verses of Rubén Darío and the prose of José Lezama Lima.
Today’s Cuban art is a story woven in contrasts—light and shadow, memory and reinvention—where every brushstroke bears witness to the revolutionary past and a vibrant, evolving, complex and even painful present. Against the weight of shared history and an intimate, aching beauty, Cuban art dances at the edge of resilience and hope. As a new generation emerges, artists like Reinier Leyva Novo dive into political landscapes, weaving digital threads into Cuba’s rich tapestry of identity, migration, and freedom. Cuban art dances on the edge of memory and reinvention, where every brushstroke bears witness to the revolutionary past and an evolving present. Bold and unyielding, it stands as Cuba’s voice and beacon, a timeless reminder of art’s power to transcend borders, speaking truths that defy time.
In many of Cuba’s shadowed galleries of today, artists breathe defiance into every stroke, weaving hidden cries for freedom beneath colours hushed by censorship. Bruguera and others dare to paint walls that try to contain them, each canvas a testament to survival under vigilant eyes. Beyond the island’s shores, exiled artists in Miami, Madrid, and New York bear the ache of separation, their art an altar to memory and resilience. They paint for a Cuba both cherished and distant, bridging borders with unbending identity—a voice, an echo, an unforgotten home.
Though Arolkis Turro will not return to Cuba, his art remains entwined with its rhythms, inspired by Cuban contemporaries and the artistic resilience born in the “Special Period.” To him, painting is a way of writing his story in layers of colour and texture, each canvas a meditation on the region’s beauty and pain. Turro’s art merges extensive knowledge and experience of European technique with Latin American soul, distilling landscapes, storms, and deserts into singular moments that tell the story of a place and its people, bound by history and the resilience of memory.
Turro does not see himself as a dissident; instead, he wears self-exile as a quiet badge, embracing a continent, Latin America, as his homeland. His art pulses with the echoes of pre-Hispanic worlds, the symbols and mysteries left beneath the Spanish Conquest’s sweeping dust. In his work, ancient signs speak through painted layers, drawing strength from the deep roots of indigenous arts and traditions. Turro’s brush calls forth a reality where cultures meet, where heritage and history intermingle in vibrant hues. His creations capture the essence of a mixed identity, a spirit of resilience rising from the fusion of blood, memory, and dream, etching a vivid testament to the blended race and the enduring power of an unbroken legacy.
Transitory Tropics unfolds as a single, continuous painting, each canvas a fragment in Arnolkis Turro’s grand composition—a line that stretches across continents, carrying memories of places lived, colours absorbed, and landscapes embedded in his spirit. Each canvas is a fragment of a sweeping narrative, capturing the essence of Latin America’s layered history. In dusty greens and ochres drawn from the Nicaraguan lake, Turro roots his latest work in earth’s raw tones, while vibrant reds echo the pulse of people and flora, binding disparate memories into a harmonious whole. Symbols of indigenous pigments, solemn faces of ancestors, and figures of conquest and faith trace Latin America’s story, a tapestry woven through shifting geographies and ancient traditions. With a mastery of colour and material, he imbues each piece with a texture that heightens its voice, while his command of geometry and architectural form allows figures to decompose and reassemble, a nod to Cubism, yet unique in spirit. Circles and spirals, evoking tribal art, ripple through his canvases, layering space and symbol as if from a sacred ritual. In every brushstroke, Turro pays homage to Latin America’s turbulent beauty, creating a dialogue between history and the present, capturing a world in fragments and wholeness, reaching across time with images both raw and transcendent. Each piece is a reverent homage to resilience—a spirit that, like ancient fabric, endures through time and transformation.
Eugenia Piza López, Art critic – 0ctober 2024