Brave New World
Enrique Rafael Ermus Fled Communism to Discover a Freedom of Vision
When renowned portrait painter Alice Neel was asked why it’s important to be honest in art, “It’s not so important,” she replied. “It’s just a privilege.”
For Cuban painter Enrique Rafael Ermus, it was a privilege denied him in his homeland. Now that he has fled to the United States, however, there are no barriers placed on his creativity. “Freedom is giving me voice,” Ermus says. “Every piece of information I get infuriates me more.” His oil on canvas series, “Muñecas con Vida,” or “Dolls Come To Life,” depicts classic backgrounds like Greek edifices, the hilly countryside, or boats crossing a body of water, with what appear to be rolling waves — curtains pulled over and back — both distorting the background, and warping the dolls in the foreground. The warped perspective also reveals the inner workings of the marionettes.
“The central idea of the series is that a human being becomes a ‘doll of life,’ of destiny,” Ermus said. “In Cuba, more specifically, a puppet of communism.” A young female doll has a smaller marionette on her shoulder, suggesting that some puppets are perhaps more equal than others. Other marionettes are depicted as lifeless, with their strings cut. “The strings are cut in the realization that he has become a puppet, doesn’t want to become a puppet, but he can’t escape his fate,” Ermus explains.
The dolls seem to have been lit by a Dutch Renaissance painter, and the canvases also give the illusion of being old and cracked, perhaps reflecting Ermus’s world-weary soul, nostalgic for a past that may never have even existed. In the immediate past, however, there is not much that Ermus is nostalgic about.
He left Cuba with his wife in 2006, ultimately fleeing to the United States through connections in the Dominican Republic, where he had successful shows at Bodden Gallery and Nader Gallery in Santo Domingo.
A contact had given him an official letter inviting him to show a formal exhibition in 2004. At that time, however, he could not get a visa for his wife. After the show, he was forced to fly back to Cuba, but left still more determined to escape. Although he had a temporary residency visa in the DR for arts related work, it wasn’t until 2006 that the Cuban government finally granted his wife a visa to accompany him there.
It took nearly three years, but in the spring of this year, he quietly obtained a visa from the Mexican Embassy, flying first to Panama, then to Mexico City, and then to Monterey, where he and his wife paid a “taxi driver” to take them across the U.S. border near Reynosa. With “tolls” paid at several checkpoints along the way, the couple showed their Cuban ID papers at the U.S. border, leading to a surprisingly short three-hour session with border guards, and embarked on the last leg of their journey — a 39-hour bus ride to Miami. Left behind in Cuba, however, were their 18-year-old daughter, their mothers, fathers, and other relatives in a sizeable family.
“In the Dominican Republic, we were surrounded by Dominicans,” he says. “Here in Miami, knowing the suffering of the Cuban people here, and how they miss what they do not have, that will make my work richer, stronger.”
Indeed, the work reflects escape.
In another series inspired by the theme of flight, a parade of cartoon-like airships, reminiscent of flying boats with oars and wings, soars to freedom above the Malecón, in Havana Harbor. “Traffic,” subtitled “Searching for the North Star,” has at the head of the parade a flying ship with a colorfully gleaming Jaguar wheel-rim, making the monochromatic Havana skyline seem all the more lonely, a cast-off.
“The government uses festivals and parades to make people happy,” Ermus said. “But this is the only parade that will make people happy.” This painting was finished in the Dominican Republic. “If I did this in Cuba, I would have had to roll it up and hide it,” Ermus said. “It’s a mixed feeling, an amalgamation of sentiments. Pain. Anger. Sadness. Yes, I am free, but there are 11 million brothers still there. So it is a bitter freedom.”
The work is also often misunderstood.
All of the dolls in his ‘Muñeca’ series wore tiny Cuban flag pendants, which a dealer in Spain had Ermus paint over because, he was told, they were “too identity driven.”
“So I dropped in a little love, maybe a group of tiny palm trees, way off in the distance,” the artist muses. He also mimicked classic Cuban postcards from the ’20s, creating a “metaphorical realism” of landscape, lush with decadence and destruction. In “Cupido,” the cherub is backed up against a wall and surrounded by barbed wire, his bow limp, his arrows not straight and true, but flaccid. In the background are ships with no sails, and blimps held aloft by cables that disappear behind ominous clouds. “Since I’ve had the use of reason, I would ask the question, ‘why can’t I do this? Why can’t I speak this?’” Ermus said. “The answers told me directly — I had to leave.”
Ermus’ work has come a long way since his first expression of the desire to emigrate from Cuba during his “Muñecas" show. “I was working well, but always with the concept of my people, my Cuba, not really feeling at home,” Ermus said. “And what is the closest thing right now to a ‘free Cuba?’ Miami!”
The city has welcomed him, and changed him.
Honesty about his peoples’ suffering, and his own, is a privilege that Enrique Rafael Ermus hopes always to express in his work; having escaped the oppression of the Cuban regime, he has the complete freedom to do so. Ermus is now represented and marketed by Avant Gallery in the Miami Design District, who plan on mounting a show later this summer.
“My art is going to change,” he said. “Logically, consciously, with color, with the cataclysmic differences between what Cuba is and what Miami is. The subject naturally will change, but the essence will not change.”
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