The collective exhibition ‘Cuban Abstractions – from the 1950s to the present day’ is the Brest section of a larger project entitled ‘All the weight of an island: Collecting Cuban art’ shared between the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, the contemporary art centre 40mcube and Passerelle in Brest. Based on the collection of art collector François Vallée, the exhibitions tackle social and political issues as much as the formal qualities of the works.

Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain presents a corpus of abstract works with their roots in Russian Constructivism and Latin American Concrete Art. A leading figure in Cuban art, Loló Soldevilla (1901-1971), acts as the key point of entry to the exhibition. She was a painter and the Cuban cultural attaché in Paris, linking the new abstract artists of Latin America in the 1950s with the European avant-garde. She shone a spotlight on geometric abstraction, especially through her gallery Color-Luz in Havana, which she founded with Pedro de Oraá (1931-2020) in 1957. The group known as Los Diez Pintores Concretos [The Ten Concrete Painters] was established with friends in 1959. This galaxy of artists was committed to the ideological promises of abstraction. The revolutionary process was complete in 1959 with the overthrow of the regime of Fulgencio Batista and abstract art became the art of change and of the notion of Cuba as a liberated island. But from 1961, when art was being influenced by the ideological radicalisation of the cultural policy of the Cuban government, which considered it to be a weapon of the revolution and demanded that artists show social engagement, abstract art began to be stigmatised and deemed to be individualist expression that was foreign to the historical-social conflicts of the time. That was why ‘The Ten Concrete painters’, like Los Once [The Eleven] before them (1953-1955), saw the potential for abstract art to engage radical social change. Empowered by this history related to the revolution, many artists were to use, and still use today, this formal language to criticise excesses of power while escaping censure and keeping their distance from the official networks.

The exhibition is interested in all those artists who worked between the lines, far from the province of State propaganda and who adopted, for a while or for the whole of their career, the form of abstraction.