The work of José Emilio Fuentes Fonseca, JEFF, possesses a startling uniqueness in contemporary Cuban art. He does not subscribe to any of the dominant trends that opt ​​for a critical approach to their contexts, expressed through multiple expressive media and their intersection, or to those that privilege formal reinterpretations of historical trends as a demonstration of skill, critical appropriation, and maturity: be it abstraction, surrealism, expressionism, transavantgarde, or pop art. Nor does he take advantage of the abundant opportunities that conceptualism or minimalism offer artists today, whether by adhering orthodoxly to their original version or to that other version (to swell the long and at times overwhelming list of neo-movements) infused with contextual subtleties, humor, irony, and parody, adapted to the most diverse existing cultural contexts thanks to its instrumental versatility. Significantly, not to say astonishingly, he excludes photography and video, other expressions recently favored by artists of so many affiliations and generations.

If I had to summarize his poetics based on his closest interests, affinities, and intentions, in an attempt to better understand his worldview, I would say it is naive. Just like that, unequivocally... without abandoning suspicions and doubts. His works possess a certain charge of innocence, candor, and idealism, but beware: it does not stem from an academic background or a sui generis personal experience, from an explicit desire to control so many codes acquired during childhood, but rather from an almost natural, organic adoption of that universe vividly expressed by children, sincerely stripped of tricks, winks, falsehoods, artificiality, arrogance, sarcasm, duplicity, and ambiguity. When José Lezama Lima was asked why he wanted to write in the way everyone knows, why he chose it as his essential language, he replied more or less: "It's not that I want to, it's that I write like that." JEFF creates in the same way: there's no need to look for another explanation. This would define him, in one way or another, as a rare, unique, incomparable artist, alienated from the artistic environment in which he operates and lives, even though at first glance we all recognize where he's going, where his notorious and prolific symbolic production is headed.Not even the mere fact of having lived in Buenavista, a neighborhood considered tough and conflictive in the northern part of the luxurious Miramar, an environmentally rich prelude to the well-known Marianao and La Lisa, led JEFF to be influenced by its complex social and cultural values, its public and secret codes, its mysteries—as immense as Gabrielle d'Annunzio would write—to produce a work contaminated by violence, ostentation, bravado, and swagger. No. He knows these categories very well and probably even identifies with some of them; they are part of his muscles and blood, of his imagination, but they don't irrigate his brain and imagination with enough force to transform them into part of his creative language and become a tough, or in some cases, marginal, alternative artist. They pass through his nervous system, through his emotions and feelings, but they continue their course to other regions of the body that allow him to develop, with serenity and moderation, a body of work that is pleasing to the eye of friends, curators, artists, critics, and neighbors above all, astonished by so much paraphernalia of enormous objects that he occasionally displays on the sidewalk of his studio-house due to lack of space inside.

After an aggressive, somewhat torn period, while studying at the ENA and later at the Higher Institute of Art, in the mid and late 90s, where he also participated as a member of the Galería DUPP project until its dissolution in 2000, JEFF makes visible a juicy amount of fears, nightmares, frustrations, and desires, through the creation of a variety of games and toys made with worn iron, weathered wood, and generally poor materials. I primarily remember his exhibition at the Ludwig Foundation in 1996, his Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the Habana Gallery in 2000, and especially his enormous installation or"playground" titled Mental Health, exhibited at the Wifredo Lam Center for Contemporary Art as part of the III Cuban Contemporary Art Biennial...Once he completed his studies at ISA in 2003, JEFF reversed this psychosocial process, which he had experienced with dramatic intensity, in works that were almost diametrically opposed.He made a 180-degree turn, abandoning the found object, the explicit intention of abundantly recycling industrial or handcrafted materials, and burying, at least temporarily, the Arte Povera aesthetic that prevailed in his work during the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally the master of his own home and destiny, surrounded by affection and kindred spirits, he decided to change the order of things. Those demons that had been galloping since his childhood were cornered, who knows for how much longer, to make way for...He moves towards a new worldview whose foundations stem from that remote region of childhood, now shaped from a different perspective, perhaps discovering his vital impulses, his primal instincts, in the very act of creation, brimming with gratitude and tenderness.

Dreams, aspirations. From the enfant terrible of Cuban art, he becomes a simple child, just one among many, without any grandiose labels, like the vast majority: only he persists in keeping alive in his adulthood the emotional and sentimental weight that this fundamental period of our lives entails.JEFF thus discovers the inherent plasticity of innocent, honest handwriting, rooted in school notebooks, diaries, and loose sheets of paper, and the undeniable value of dozens and hundreds of objects that populate the imagination and material existence of children. And he sets out to reclaim a cultural space that he believed lost in the experiential chaos of adulthood.He discovers the natural expressiveness of urban graffiti and of every mark found anywhere, be it a wall, a tree, or the asphalt, a silent and incorruptible witness to our own human joys and sorrows.

Nelson Herrera Ysla