The most important graffiti artists in New York - Coco 144 and Nato included - came together yesterday in homage to the poet and art critic Antonio Zaya, who will be buried today in San Feliu de Guíxols with the ceremonial robe of the Prince of Santería. I connect one very different act with the other to emphasize the complexity of a person who made his entire life an attention-getting act of creation. In this era of orthodoxies and corrections, we are made even more aware, and blessedly so, of the extravagances and strange fancies that the brothers Zaya - Antonio and his twin, Octavio, one of today's best-known critics - created in their youth, giving form to what would be an unmistakable vision of international art. There is no shortage of stories of that pair of young radicals, cultivators of confusion thanks to their similar appearance, those two experts in marginalization who themselves indulged in nearly all excesses, and how their provocations and practical jokes threatened, time and again, to put them in the papers and also before the judge.
Later, with the (relative) mellowing of age, each brother took his own path, marked by different passions, and one in common: art. And if Octavio, who lives and works in New York, took the more tranquil route, Antonio latched on to the pulse of contemporary art, constantly seeking new discoveries, be it in Havana, Sao Paolo or Venice, where he revealed what were perhaps his finest skills as a curator and organizer. The Cuban government officially thanked him for his work in 2003, making him only the fifth foreigner to receive the award of distinction for national culture. Of the nine Havana art biennials, Zaya organized three, and the catalogs of those events remain a testament of his critical daring, good eye and, as an expert editor, the formal perfection he displayed.
But it was in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, where he was born in 1954, where he left the especially strong imprint, as director of exhibitions, always alert to the vanguard, and also in his work on publications like Atlántica, which he edited and co-edited in the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno for 20 years, and also in the two years he served, with brilliance, as editor of Blanco y Balcón. Impressive though it may be, this short list of accomplishments would be incomplete if, beyond his excellent monographs, his literary vocation, his poetic incursions in irrationalism, his inexhaustible capacity for invention, both in life and art, were not mentioned.
But today, saying goodbye to Antonio, remembering with sadness and emotion his enthusiasm, his sense of humor, the tenderness and mischief of a boy who never grew up, it does not surprise me that New York's graffiti artists and Cuba's Santeros evoke his name at the same time. It doesn't surprise me that his remains lie in the ground of his chosen retreat in Cataluña even as they mourn in the Canary Islands a troublemaker of the contemporary art world that was an island unto himself:
An island co-inhabited by the Santero and iconoclast without the slightest failures of understanding between then. As audaciously contemporary as ever.
Translated by Ken Bensinger
Photo: Blanca Martinez
(c) 2007 El País. Reprinted by Permission