Baskiat at Shafrazi

The flat, brilliant surfaces of color are an influence of the strong impact I received from seeing for the first time a solo show by Jean Michel Basquiat; at Tony Shafrazi gallery. That distant day of 1998 Ana my Canadian girlfriend and I where strolling down Soho looking at the work in the galleries. In those days Chelsea wasn’t an art destination and all the major artistic events were still going on in Soho.  We arrived at Shafrazi’s the next day the gallery took down Baskiat’s show and it felt so bad not to have the opportunity to see it that we went to talk to the manager of the gallery. I said to him” I’m an artist from Cuba and I came to see Jean Michel Basquiat show. I know it was taken down yesterday but is there anything that we can look at?” The manager, “ Wait a minute”. He goes to talk to Tony in his office surrounded by smoked glass walls and comes back to us, “Follow me”. We walked to the back of the gallery and there is a stair that goes to the basement. The manager lift up the cord that prohibit visitors to go through, and down we go. To my outmost surprise the whole Jean Michel Baskiat show is in front of us, in the basement, just like when Baskiat used to work in the basement of Anina Nosey gallery. I've been waiting for this moment for years. There was a yellow painting with foam on it and tons of black tar; there were some other major pieces made on wood; assemblages with tons of nails on it; several drawings in their frames. ”Charlie Parker sold for $150 thousand”, say the manager. Les than ten years later they were selling for millions.

While living in Cuba a friend of mine, who was also a friend of Basquiat, send me a book of him as a present. He knew I was a major Basquiat fan. I never dreamed of visiting New York, much less seeing a Baskiat painting alive. It still amazes me how strange life is. The yellow and orange surfaces of these works come directly from that day of shocking Basquiat basement experience.  This is how New York and Basquiat felt for a young Cuban artist those days. Like being in heaven and hell at once. Like being torched by light and sorrounded by darkness at unison. I have tried to convey the conflicted emotions of those times in these works.