Luis Cruz Azaceta: No Exit is the first substantial overview of the work of the Cuban-American artist Luis Cruz Azaceta (born 1942). Azaceta’s childhood memories in Cuba (where he remained until he was 18 years old) mix with his first professional experiences in New York City (where he studied at the School of Visual Arts and where he lived for three decades) and those of his period of professional maturity in New Orleans.
Azaceta’s brightly polychromatic painting explores “an aesthetics of constant escapes,” as Iván de la Nuez put it. His imaginary, revealed in works that range between figuration and abstraction, is suffused with anguish, pain, shipwrecks and violence. His paintings reflect his environment and his condition of more than 50 years: that of an exile in the United States.
Azaceta’s brightly polychromatic painting explores “an aesthetics of constant escapes,” as Iván de la Nuez put it. His imaginary, revealed in works that range between figuration and abstraction, is suffused with anguish, pain, shipwrecks and violence. His paintings reflect his environment and his condition of more than 50 years: that of an exile in the United States.