Israel Delmonte and Eugenio D’Melon at Mutual Gallery soon

D and D Distillers: Israel Delmonte and Eugenio D’Melon show APRIL 12-MAY 12, 2012.

D and D Distillers, for the first time, brings together the works by two very distinct artists, Israel Delmonte and Eugenio D’Melon, in a two-man exhibition. One a painter and draughtsman, the other a printmaker, their styles vary widely and so does their thematic range. Their main link is their common Cuban heritage and their diaspora experience in Jamaica. Both are graduates of the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, moved to Jamaica fifteen years ago, and lecture at the Edna Manley College.

Eugenio D’Melon, in many of his often humorous, absurd or ironic prints, includes subtle but powerful social and political commentary. Born in Havana in 1954 D’Melon has exhibited widely locally and internationally. His works in this exhibition go beyond traditional printmaking techniques; they are based on montage matrixes which he produces by searching for images in magazines, cutting them carefully with scissors and pasting them onto acid-free paper with glue: “I recycle things,” D’Melon explains his postmodernist approach that also includes references to famous works in art history. “I change the context, re-contextualise images, combine one image with another and create a new context.” If he cannot find a certain image that he needs for a composition, he makes it himself by drawing, painting or cutting: “What I cannot find, I do,” he asserts.

D’Melon started working in montage in 1997, when he acquired a photocopy machine. In keeping with the traditional approach to printmaking, which requires a matrix, a proof, and a BAT (“good to print”), he insists on creating real, not digital, matrixes. These he then prints using the xerography technique. D’Melon enjoys teasing his viewers with visual puns, metaphors, and at times surreal imagery. Titles are very important in his works and form a part of the game with the image. Sometimes they help to read the image, other times there is no obvious connection.

Similarly, some of Israel Delmonte’s works also display surreal and dream-like imagery – even though his approach is very different to D’Melon’s. Delmonte who only changed from drawing to painting in 2005, paints from his imagination and sees himself “more as a representationalist than a realist”; citations of Magritte and Miró are evident. Most if not all of his works in this show relate to his own life story and reference his exile from Cuba. In this way they are very personal, yet not all are autobiographical but take on broader meaning, for example by questioning the motivations behind the mass migration from Cuba.

The sea as a recurring motif in Delmonte’s paintings is delineated as a mysterious and transitional place of hope, danger and disappointment. Inhabited by fantastic sculptures of material waste, the paintings also comment on the side-effects of Western consumerism and false hopes of Cubans wishing to leave their country. Many of the works are divided into halves or quarters, thus also formally alluding to the experiences of immigrants who are often torn between and yet connected to more than one place. “If you leave your country,” Delmonte believes, “you have to pay a price for it, emotionally or socially.”

Claudia Hucke
Senior Lecturer, Art History, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts

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