Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernandez)

Tonel

b. in Havana, Cuba, 1958. lives and works in Cuba and Canada.

In addition to being an art historian and the author of indispensable texts on contemporary Cuban art, Tonel has contributed to a revival of thought-provoking conceptual humour in Cuban art. Tonel’s creations draw inspiration from the countercultural comics of the 1960s, including the work of R. Crumb; 1970s conceptual art, as well as from the international “new image” art of the 1980s. His early formation as an artist included regular publication of his drawings and cartoons, notably in DDT, a bi-weekly humour magazine published in Cuba in the 1970s. His works address a viewer who can accept complicity in Tonel’s caustic vision of humanity, his detailed exploration of bodily functions, and his anti-romantic concept of sexuality and sentiment: Sex and the City minus the credit cards, sweating in the tropical heat.

In Tonel’s works the human (Cuban) body seems to become conscious of its own odors and fluids, with a compelling sensory intensity. Unlike some of his compatriots, Tonel is not interested in deconstructing historical narratives. He is a visceral explorer who ventures into territories that are taboo in art, setting his gaze on inconsequential, everyday moments.

Unlike some contemporary artists, who freeze instants of their lives by incorporating real objects into their works, Tonel employs the same old-fashioned tool used by the archaic artists of Lascaux and Altamira: the simplicity of line. It is an essential trace that defines the boundaries, the limitations, of the paper, and projects itself into three-dimensional space through sketches of sculptures and installations. In this fashion, Tonel demonstrates the integrity and complexity of his conceptual thought, an inexhaustible well from which he “extracts” his artworks, which are then fleshed out in various formats as he finds technical solutions that satisfy him.

Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández) graduated with a degree (Licenciatura) in Art History from the Facultad de Artes y Letras, The University of Havana, Cuba in 1982.

His latest solo exhibition titled The Journey (Talking Walls) opened on December, 2012 at Factoría Habana Center for Contemporary Art, in Havana, Cuba. His most recent one-person shows include Nothing to Learn, at Galería Habana, Havana (2010); The Parts Of Me That Sweat The Most When I Get Nervous, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with Walter C. Koerner Library, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Cosmos. Feeling the pull of gravity, Chelsea Gallery, Miami, U.S.A. (2009); and Some information is now available, Teck Gallery, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.

In recent years he has contributed to the following group shows: The Berlin Biennale (2014), La perversión de lo clásico: anarquía de los relatos, Cuban Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy (2013); Las metáforas del cambio, Factoría Habana, Havana, Cuba (2012); The End of Money, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2011); Story Book / Story Board (Libro de cuentos), Sala Naos, Santander, Spain (2010), and Cuba. Art and History from 1868 to today, Groninger Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands (2009) and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2008).

He has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (Community Education Program, 2001) and was a visiting artist and lecturer at the Center for Latin American Studies and at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University (2001-03).

Among his projects as a curator, in 1990 he co-curated Kuba o.k. at the Stadtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany. In 2004 he co-curated Rogue Nations. Cuban and Chinese Artists at MACLA, San Jose, California. He is currently a co-curator of an exhibition of contemporary art from Havana that will open at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery on January 2014.

His articles and essays on Cuban and Latin American contemporary art have been published regularly in catalogues, magazines and books in Cuba and abroad, and have been translated into English, German, Dutch, Portuguese and French.

His artworks have been collected by Havana's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes; Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; Van Reekum Museum, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands; Daros Collection, Zurich, Switzerland; University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Department of Fine Arts, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, U.S.A.; Arizona State University Museum, Tempe, U.S.A.; Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, U.S.A.; Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, U.S.A; Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A. among other institutions.

In 2003 Tonel received the Cuban Artists Fund Award (Cuban Artists Fund, New York, U.S.A.). He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities (1997-98) with residency at The University of Texas, Austin, and a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for painting and installation art (1995). Also in 1995 he was an Artist in Residence at West Walls Studios and Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K. In 1992 he was an Artist in Residence at the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany. He was awarded the prize for art criticism by the Cuban Section of the International Art Critics Association (AICA) in 1988. He received the Rafael Blanco Honorary Mention in Drawing at the First Havana Biennial (1984).

PAST EXHIBITIONS at Mónica Reyes Gallery

Robert Kleyn | Manuel Piña | Tonel | Naufragio (2016)

Getting Physical / By Keith Wallace
Excerpts from the essay written by Wallace for the exhibition catalogue

The majority of Tonel’s artwork consists of drawings, and most of them involve some form of self-portraiture; at times it is obvious, and at times not. His self-portrait functions as a kind of alter ego, and the rendering of it on paper offers Tonel a means of expression that he might not otherwise exercise in his everyday socialized life.

The drawing process gives licence to explore the recesses of the mind through traces of the body—the hand—in ways that are not contingent upon realistic transcription, it is a space where logic can lose its anchor. Tonel presents us with figures that somehow continue to function in spite of a still-bloodied amputated limb, or a useless arm that exaggeratedly extends into a shit-like pile on the ground, or a penis that enters the ground and re-emerges as a plant. Unlike a photograph, even a digitally manipulated one, his drawings are not intended to impress us with a simulacrum of reality. The body and its organic fluidity, its often messy unpredictability within the propriety of how it is expected to behave socially, find a place in Tonel’s imagination. And drawing is a venue for him to unearth anxious psycho/social states of mind that invade everyone’s inner, and often troubled, relationship with the world regardless of geography, class, or sex.

I believe everyone has thoughts they don’t readily want to admit to thinking about. Such thoughts that enter the deepest corners of our minds are not based on logic but are based on what unsettles the norms and systems that supposedly keep our lives in order, that keep us safe. Tonel explores the lack of order and logic that taunts us, and he does it, for the most part, without judgement; he makes propositions rather than proclamations.

Another element that is fundamental in almost all of Tonel’s work is language. His interest in the relationship between the image and the word has been evident from his earliest drawings influenced by both popular and political cartoons where, within this genre, a relationship between word and image is inherently a symbiotic one. Words provide a framework for a reading of the image, and, visa versa, the image illustrates the words.

Tonel’s interest in language also stems from his encounter with conceptual art and its placement of language as a central component within the workings of an artwork. The use of language in conceptual art that developed in Latin America, which was his first experience of it, was poetic and ambiguous, although often in a politicized way. Luis Camnitzer, who moved from Uruguay to New York in the 1960s, and who first exhibited in Havana in 1983, is an important link between Latin American and Euroamerican concerns. In his work, Camnitzer incorporated language in order to destabilize the meaning that exists in both the word and image. He created relationships that functioned less like the caption of a cartoon and more like two entities encountering each other within the space of an art object. Words, like images, don’t necessarily have stable meanings, but instead, can embrace ambiguity through their own necessary reasoning.

So where does Tonel’s three-dimensional work fall within the context of his drawing and its content? To begin with, it does not fit into one clear category: There are sculptures that stand independent of the drawings and portraiture; there are others that are based on the self-portraits, and then there are full-scale installations.

The relationship between his drawing, and for that matter his sketches, and sculpture follows no logic, but a relationship does exist, although the order of what would seem to come first is not always adhered to. A sketch can be made for a sculpture, a sculpture can be made without a drawing, a drawing can then be completed after the sculpture, or any order thereof. The differences/similarities between the drawings and the sculptures lie not in the norm of what should come first, but in the ways they represent. Drawings primarily involve the eye and mind; within the hierarchy of art, drawing is the workhorse, the vehicle for the evolution of ideas, and anything can happen. Drawing is a representation, sculptures are physical objects that exist in space and time, and thus bring into play the relational presence of our bodies. The installations emphasize this physicality even further in that the viewer is literally inside the artwork.

In order to understand an artist’s cosmos, one desires a kind of logic to emerge. In Tonel’s work, it’s there, but it’s difficult to locate because he keeps logic illusive. What he does in both his drawings and his sculpture is unsettle our assumptions about the way we think things should be.

i Artist Statement in catalogue for Utopian Territories: New Art from Cuba (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery/Contemporary Art Gallery: Vancouver, 1997), 122.