The late work of the late Cuban master Micah Carpentier is a wasp's nest of puzzles and contradictions. Desiccated drivel mingles uneasily with the lashes of pure brilliance. Boundless intellectual energy coexists with the cloying lassitude of old age. Sometimes, even within the same work, the supple, subtle and the lyrical are conjoined to the bulky cumbrousness of cliché.
Such is the case with Nido de la Víbora, Carpentier's final, solemn unfinished drawing.
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| Nido de la Víbora, Micah Carpentier 1969 - 1973 |
Long after the harps of heaven have greeted the martyred maestro and longer still after the name Carpentier has became synonymous with the Latin American avant-garde, the discovery of Nido de la Víbora has forced us to reappraise the legacy of this legendary artist.
The work was discovered in a small warehouse connected to the Gran Teatro de La Habana by the art historian Robinho Sephora. Impeccably restored by Daphne Vhrozhinska of the State Russian Museum in St.Petersburg, the drawing is a document of a great artist's tragic decline.
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| Robinho Sephora |
In her forthcoming book on the subject, Sephora speculates on the probability of some sort of retinal debility that caused a radical erosion of the artist's technical skills. She goes on to assert that the penultimate panel represents a panoply of demons and hobgoblins - evidence of Carpentier's late life obsession with the spells and rituals of Afro-Cuban santería.
Perhaps, but maybe Carpentier's lifelong appetite for Havana Club Blanco and counterfeit Cohibas has something to do with it as well .
