Clowns

2021

Drawing

“In the Valley only sparrows are free”

Text by: Anamely Ramos

An artist insists on receiving drawing materials at the Guanajay Maximum Security Prison. His name is Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. After much insistence, he gets the meager allowance of a notebook and two crayons per visit. The guards are stunned by the joy with which he receives these items. They are treasures. But it is not enough for the artist and he begins to flatten and sew cigar boxes together in order to continue to draw. Anything that he can get his hands on works.

Clowns begin to emerge. They are portraits. Almost self-portraits. Combining all the colors that he has been able to acquire, he shapes a gallery of emotions with minimal variations where human nature is recreated - the most basic and visceral that accompanies us all. Luis is stubborn. We know that. Without being able to leave, only seeing the sun once a day, looking to the sky through a small window, he connects us with his and our essential needs, with that which makes us laugh, cry, wonder, doubt, feel fear, or have desires. How do you keep feeling those desires inside a jail cell?

Some of the drawings have short phrases, such as votive offerings. Some recall previous experiences from his life: “In the Valley only sparrows are free,” one says, referring to March 2020 when he was imprisoned for 14 days in Valle Grande (Grand Valley) prison. Between the two prisons, little more than a year has passed and the country has changed. Luis knows it. His clowns are the melancholic but courageous face of a country for which change is costing lives. The clowns are the face of a painful and great labor of which we are all a part.

Luis Manuel Otero has been in prison for more than five months. While imprisoned, he has become one of the 100 Most Influential People of the Year according to Time Magazine. Throughout this time, art has been what has kept him company. For Luis, art is neither an altar nor a pedestal, just like the homeland. His clowns are portraits of a homeland today that is drowning, that is screaming, and that still manages to transmit hope.

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