Luis Cruz Azaceta

Luis Cruz Azaceta (born April 5, 1942) is a Cuban American painter.

Azateca has been active in painting and drawing since the late 1970s. In usually large-format works executed with highly expressive colors, Cruz Azaceta has dealt with themes of urban violence, the type of personal isolation that comes with living in a large and overcrowded city, the hellish conditions created by mismanaged government, the abuses and oppression of dictatorships, and in a number of works done in the late 1980s, the ravages of AIDS.

Early life and work

Luis Cruz Azaceta was born in Havana, Cuba. As a teenager, he witnessed many acts of violence on the streets of Havana: bombs in stores, cinemas and theaters, shoot-outs, arrests, and torture of citizens by Batista secret police. In 1959, the Cuban revolution brought jubilation and celebration when Castro promised to restore Cuba's constitution and free elections. Months later executions began, businesses were confiscated and some closed. Azaceta's experiences under both Batista and post-revolution impacted his vision—creating a sensitivity towards violence, human cruelty, injustice, and alienation—which later become central themes in his work.

At 18 years old, Azaceta left Cuba for New York City. Drawing and painting became the means for expressing himself and creating an identity in the big metropolis of the city. In 1969, he graduated from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. After graduation, he developed series of works addressing the human condition. In 1975, he had his first solo show at the Allan Frumkin Gallery on 57th Street, exhibiting works from the Subway Series. In the mid-1970s, at the beginning of his career, Azaceta tended to fill his compositions with numerous cartoony images and figures which were boldly colored and clearly outlined. Many of the paintings articulate a shallow cramped space. Azaceta underscores his vision of the urban dweller as a threatened figure, someone who is constantly being pushed, pulled, and squeezed by both the environment and other people.

While Azaceta's "apocalyptic pop" style characterized his initial entry into the art world, he soon felt a need to move on. It could be said that Azaceta's need to change is not only one of the features that distinguishes him from other painters, whether figurative or abstract, but it is also emblematic of his life as both an exile and an alien. He lives in the Diaspora and knows that home is something he carries with him that there is no final and permanent refuge.

By the 1980s, his cramped compositions shift to a centralized, nude figure (often self-portrait) that dominates the composition. The mood and color are somber and the figure is often distorted.

Luis Cruz Azaceta is one of the great expressionists. In the neo-expressionist boom of the 80s, he was who revived "the historic role of expressionism as a social and moral force", as Rachel Weiss said. Azaceta is the great urban chronicler, the painter of contemporary Babylons with their landscapes of violence, drugs, crime, plagues, and fires. It is not strange that the great critical painting of New York City as paradigm of a metropolis has been carried out by an immigrant of the Third World.

Later life and work

In the early 1990s his work incorporated figuration and abstraction, perhaps extending from some of the works of the Aids Epidemic Series where abstraction is present as an ominous abyss. He returns to the subject of Balseros and Exiles using fields of circles and grids to generate a piercing dialog with the figure. In 1992 he moves with his wife and two sons from New York to New Orleans