Moisés Finalé: When Ovaries Reign And Vaginas Rule

To connect with Finalé – and the women of his paintings – dozens of friends and followers of his art came to the imposing building of the Havana Malecon with its caryatids looking out to sea. (14ymedio)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 20 May 2017 — Havana has always been female in every millimeter, edifice or cracked wall. This city could have any of the female faces that the fine artist Moisés Finalé displays this Friday at the Hispanic-American Center of Culture under the title, “The Weight Of Her Body.” A show where ovaries reign and vaginas rule.

Finalé is carried away by the female body. He represents figures with an unleashed eroticism that betrays his obsessions and his preferences. Pressed between thighs and caught between two breasts, thus appear each of the works created by the artist born in Matanzas in 1957, one of the most prominent names of the generation of the eighties.

“These pictures belong to my personal collection, they have been with me for a long time, some since the mid 90’s,” says Finalé. (14ymedio)

To connect with Finalé – and the women of his paintings – dozens of friends and followers of his art came to the imposing building on the Havana Malecon with its caryatids looking out to sea. On the walls, witness to reunions and toasting with a pinch of rum, the feminine forms concentrated on the truly transcendent: love, life, conception and death.

The artist knows well of hugs and distance. Although he frequently participates in exhibitions on the island and maintains Studio Finalé-Art in Vedado, he spends much of his time in Paris. More than once he has had to pack the eroticism and carry it in the suitcase with which he crosses the Atlantic. That is why the maidens of his paintings come a little bit from here, and others from there and many from nowhere.

In painting, as in sexuality, daring is rewarded, his brushes tell us. (14ymedio)

The painter’s references are diverse, he calls on the Japanese print as well as Egyptian symbols while drawing on expressionism and the very Cuban avant-garde. In painting, as in sexuality, daring is rewarded, his brushes tell us. So in his pictures African masks and mythological allusions appear.

“These pictures belong to my personal collection, they have been with me for a long time, some since the mid 90’s,” Finale tells 14ymedio. He says it is as if he fears that some have forgotten him. They are infinite canvases like wide and fecund sheets: beds without limits.

The curators of the exhibition, Rafael Acosta de Arriba and Yamilé Tabío, have succeeded in compiling those beloved or dreamed of women who haunt the artist. Women who look, lick, hide behind a mask, desire or copulate. Perishable bodies trapped in the immortal sensuality of a brushstroke.

”In love with her own game.” (14ymedio)

Finalé has ended up creating his own cosmogony, a universe of sensual beings that are born and perish without leaving the cycle of love. A universe caught in a spasm, where the artist takes refuge and allows viewers to enter.

The scenes of lasciviousness and desire are prolonged when, when descending the wide staircase of the Hispanic-American Center, one enters fully into a sensual and impudent Havana. A city that, like the women painted by Finalé, long ago that lost its modesty.