SLOW CHEETAH

Chinatown Soup is delighted to present Slow Cheetah, an exhibition of oil on canvas paintings by Cuba-based artist Miguel Machado that is on view from February 2 - 28, 2021. Please join us for an evening reception on February 17th from 7pm, when the artist will be present (virtually from his studio in Havana) to take live questions and engage in public conversation. 

‘Slow Cheetah’ is a contradiction to the norm. While a slow cheetah couldn’t survive in the wild, this abberative concept can be understood as transcending the physical, acting instead as a metaphor to describe a person's state of mind. Miguel Machado’s paintings depict creatures that are 'slow' by nature of their existence as painted forms, but they also reveal the artist’s sociocultural imagination. 

In Mascotas de Venice (the pets of venice), lilac clouds melt into soft seaspray as a glamorous  woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat kneels beside her pair of leashed cheetah pets at the Venice Beach shoreline. At first glance, this dreamy scene lulls the viewer into relaxed acceptance of a most unusual encounter. It’s an exotic shock to our meditative sides, inviting reflection about what ostentatious displays and behaviors we are conditioned to accept as routine. In Cuba, excess consumerism simply does not exist. 

The ecstatic imagery of Miguel's diptych, Comienza La Batalla Entre Los Unos y Ellos Mismos (the battle between the ones and themselves) is another play on tonality and subject that harkens back to his days in art school, during which Miguel waged internal battle with his ego as an artist. Here we meet Goya, Velasquez, and other like-minded Renaissance painters who are rooted in Miguel’s egoic imagination as a young painter attending Instituto Superior de Arte (The University of Arts of Cuba) in 2015.

Despite its chaotic, surreal amalgamation of classical war references, we are meant to understand that he painted with a mood of serenity. Where does that feeling come from? For Miguel, perhaps it stems from his defiance of expectation. Textured blood exploding from moments of victory and defeat appear like live action in front of us, as a mercurial purple sky backdrops shadows of horses rising to the heavens. In the distance we notice invading armies led by the eponymous Marlboro Man of our modern Western canon, whose symbolic influence pervades Miguel’s practice. Rather aptly, a critic once described Miguel’s work as “Disney meets Delacroix.” 

When Miguel dreams about battle scenes and escape to California, he flips traditional understandings of glory through violence and materialism by painting from a perspective of peace and satire, constituting a break from Cuba’s insistence on romanticizing and subsequent subversion of the American Dream that calls from a faraway coast. So too are we asked to consider what is authentic and true beyond the surface as a pathway to freedom. 

Art is how Miguel, and other remarkable Cuban artists throughout history, take on the wider world. Here, Miguel transmutes the raw material of his experience into a personal happiness that contains messages for life.

Miguel Alejandro Machado Suarez (b. 1990) is a painter in the traditional sense of the word, as he applies the thoroughness and spirit of a bygone era to contemporary themes. His paintings deal with ego, humanity, and subconscious states, which are conveyed through imaginative worlds of characters and crafted with a suggestion of humor. Through his temporal style that often pays homage to Romanticism as well as Renaissance-era influences, Miguel asks us to consider what is authentic and true beyond the surface as a pathway to freedom.

Miguel was raised in the small town of Sandino near the western coast of Cuba. His family moved to the port of Mariel, where his father worked as a sailor, and later settled in Havana so Miguel could attend Cuba's top art school, the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), from which he graduated in 2014. The following year, his work was selected for the Havana Biennale and has since been shown at galleries around the world, including in Los Angeles, Hamburg, and now New York.