Painting meant a revelation, an act that had to be consummated on canvas as soon as possible. Alfredo Sosabravo was in his fertile 20s when he discovered the great Wifredo Lam and his powerful pictorial load full of symbols, mysticism and deities that blend together with a thrilling artistic force.
The young man from Sagua La Grande (Villa Clara), the same land where Lam was born, had studied piano and then tried his luck as a writer of short stories that were published in the Diario de La Marina. But those colors with their infinite possibilities for creation went too far in his mind.
The night course at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Alejandro where he learned clay modeling, natural drawing and geometry was his only school, the rest was pure talent and above all willpower; the guiding idea of triumph was a breeding ground in the beginning and now when he is already an essential in the visual arts of Cuba he does not abandon the habit of not stopping, although success has been settled in his life for some time.
For sure, what does that universe called Sosabravo mean?
"From Alfredo Sosabravo's hand, childhood is transmuted and becomes the whole life. He is closer than any Cuban artist to everything we forget as we grow older or become adults. His work travels to the center of the so-called golden age, that unknown zone where we once grew up and when we thought it was already a comfortable place to reside, we were inexorably dragged into the vertigo of youth," explained art critic and researcher Rafael Acosta de Arriba some time ago at the presentation of the Sosabravo catalog on paper produced by the Collage Ediciones label.
The power of his works lies in the joy they transmit, in their empathic charge and in their ability to interact as if we have always known them. Sosabravo enters into the eyes of others like a symphony of colors that has no end. Characters come and go, there is music, games, plants, exotic figures in landscapes capable of taking us out of the obstinate routine.
A world for the senses, a path where green, blue, yellow, red and pink speak to us of the night, of the jungle, of flowers and of charismatic characters with a language that, like an X-ray, brings back to us the essences of which we are made. The creator invites us to contemplate the positive side of things.
Stroke by stroke, the artist gives volume to his proposal to take us into his paintings, his ceramics or his engravings, the format does not matter if happiness itself resides, there, so close to us.
At the beginning of his career, the National Prize of Plastic Arts feared to be mistaken for a naïve artist and precisely that seal of naivety is his most distinctive pictorial condition. We know of his affable character, of his childlike eyes, of his natural freshness seen in his personality, these are elements that are also appreciated in his creative feeling, but there is something more, something that his characters say just by looking at them: like those who know their beauty and are not afraid to show it, his characters show that they feel at ease with their scenarios, with their own acts, in other words, there are no signs of doubt or subtleties of concerns, rather each artistic "event" reflected is enjoyable to the fullest.
Men who dominate birds in full flight, women lost in the manigua or countless acts of magic are some of the adventures of the artist, which we have assumed as ours again and again, and to which we will have to return more frequently, especially in these complex times, because there, in that world, joy has no limits.