Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara

“A door is what it is: a seam, an opening and closing of the eyes, a frontier, a possibility, or at least an access. Like many objects, doors are often absorbed by their functions. Yet their liminal nature makes them retain their status as extraordinary objects, as something greater than everyday or even collectible things. Doors concentrate the tensions that exist between inside and outside, intimacy and protection, escape and seclusion. Doors are fertile in and of themselves, like trees, breasts, symbolic phalli, or the Giant African snail. They are self-sufficient and, at the same time, I can’t think of any other object that depends more on the network of relations it enacts, on the dimensions it activates and launches with a simple push.

“When Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara began drawing doors I immediately thought of the African doors that I discovered years ago, their regional differences accentuating their strength, beauty, and narrative possibilities. In those cultures, a door is a synthesis of the energy that fills the world, a force on the economic or social materiality of specific contexts, and even a sublimation of the human body resident in that object. That is to say, a door constitutes something akin to a real-life body that acts, and welcomes, while filtering.

“I believe that Luis Manuel’s doors are linked, almost unconsciously, with a primitive experience he has intuited. Unconsciously may not be the right word, so perhaps I should say spontaneously or tacitly. What I mean is that the connections his drawings make are not strictly rational. Like much of his work, a specific type of game or experience is hinted at; forms and gestures awaken an avalanche of meanings, some conventional and others unconventional enough that they in fact awaken us. Luis Manuel is a relentless agitator both subjectively and objectively: he calls attention to himself constantly and consistently agitates others and their beliefs. These doors—asymmetrical, capricious, and even predictably anthropomorphic—connect the artist to a sculptural practice he adopted as a young man, one that remits to woodworking as a hobby but also to his own past. These drawings are like a prequel to a series of sculptures not yet made which are, simultaneously, a provisional conclusion for all the sculptures he has made to date, but also of his performances and even his political activism.”

— Anamely Ramos, Art Critic and Artist

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is a visual artist, a free speech activist, and a civil rights defender in Cuba. He is the co-founder of Havana’s Museum of Dissidence and the general coordinator of the San Isidro Collective, a group of artists formed in 2018 to promote freedom of expression and cultural rights in response to the restrictions established by Decree 349, a law that criminalizes independent artistic activity on the island. Otero Alcántara is the target of an ongoing campaign of intimidation and harassment by the Cuban government; he has been forcibly disappeared by police countless times.

According to PEN America, “the goal of such deplorable acts is clear: silence dissent, terrorize artists, and limit freedom of expression.” Having met and corresponded with Otero Alcántara over the years I can say these government tactics will not work—so long as his allies inside and outside the island continue to support the cause of freedom of artistic expression inside Cuba, in the U.S., and around the world.

— CVF, USFCAM