Carlos Alfonzo: Where Tears Can't Stop

Where Tears Can't Stop
1986
Carlos Alfonzo

acrylic on canvas
95 3/4 x 128 1/4 in. (243.2 x 325.8 cm.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum
1998.18

On view at:
Smithsonian American Art Museum
3rd floor, East Wing

Alfonzo borrowed from Cuban Santería*, medieval Catholic mysticism, and tarot cards to build a dense network of symbols floating in huge limpid tears. Where Tears Can't Stop reflects the violence that Alfonzo experienced before he fled with the Marielitos exiled by Castro in 1980. But the work also holds subtle clues that evoke Alfonzo's homosexuality and the fear and anger generated by the AIDS epidemic. In the mid-1980s, Americans coming to terms with thousands of deaths began to piece together enormous quilts—as the artist stitched together several canvases for this image—filling them with symbols of suffering, loss, and defiance. In Alfonzo's painting, the image of a tongue spiked by a dagger is a Santería charm against gossip and the "evil eye," two responses to HIV-positive men that were common in the epidemic's early years. Rumors and innuendo shaped the perception that AIDS was only a gay man's disease, and the evil eye recalls a widespread belief that the tears of the infected carried the virus. Alfonzo died of AIDS five years after he completed this work.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

*Santeria, commonly referred to as Latin American magic, is a fused religion that intertwines aspects of Roman Catholicism as it is practiced in Cuba with "magic." Although the vast majority of santeros, followers of the religion, are found in Cuba, Santeria is by no means indigenous to the island. Santeria, deriving from the Spanish word santo, or saint, is the Cuban name for this religion because of the significance of saint worship. Despite the trappings of the Catholic sainthood, Santeria remains intrinsically an African religion that

originated on the shores of the Nile River in present-day Nigeria among the Yoruba tribe. It was inevitable that the religion would reach Cuba along with the slaves being imported from Africa in the slave trade.

Like most other African tribes in the process of creating a systematized, tangible religion, the Yoruba conceptualized "God" as an unknown mysterious, creating force. Beneath the omnipotent god is a pantheon of orishas, gods and goddesses that are extraordinarily human.

There are many orishas in the pantheon. Some African authorities say the number exceeds 600. However, only a few of these are known and paid homage to throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.


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Carlos Alfonzo
Period: Contemporary
1950 - 1991

Murano water, 1987, Acreylic on canvas
60 x 43 1/2 inches

Carlos Alfonzo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1950. He went to the San Alejandro School of Plastic Arts and then to the Cuban Academy from 1969 to 1972. A year later, he attended the University of Havana, graduating in 1977.
Carlos Alfonzo died in Miami, FL in 1991.

"In Cuba I was a well known artist. I had found a formula --swarms of little figurines and the integration of literary texts--through which I could deal with many themes without raising suspicion or criticism. Painters younger than I were told that I was something like the limit of what was allowed, to go beyond could cause problems with the cultural authorities. When I arrived in the United States it took me more than a year to start painting again. The arrival, the trip from the Port of Mariel, was a shock. My fundamental search has been in the structural form, in how to paint an image, in how to let the hand go. This has been my only preoccupation, since I have never had conceptual conflicts with my work. My interest as a painter is to create new symbols, rather than employ conventional imagery. My identification with religion is that of creator more than interpreter. The symbology is important, the tongue for me represents oppression; the cross--and I use many crosses in my work-- has mystical connotations, it represents a spiritual balance, sacrifice; the tears are a symbol of exile. My paintings have to do with my exile, with my personal drama as I see it."