Lesbia’s visual work has long occupied a prominent position in Cuban visual art on its own right. Her calling emerged early in the central region of the country. Even though she was born in Cruces, halfway between Santa Clara and Cienfuegos, currently a municipality of the latter, her training took place in the first.
A dark-skinned girl of humble origins who could not afford to study Architecture in Havana, as she wished, Lesbia initially channeled her dreams in the Normal School for Teachers in Santa Clara. She encountered painting and drawing here. At home, her mother, a seamstress of exquisite taste and great hands, and her father, a cabinetmaker, with full mastery of his trade, encouraged their young daughter. They taught her to never give up and to a large degree, influenced the artist’s poetics.
At night, she studied in Santa Clara in an environment populated by people devoted to the arts. Love for the arts was growing in Lesbia. She remembers the teachers of that time, Antonio Alejo, and one that marked her life forever, Carmelo González, a professor who soon shared his personal life with her. Carmelo and Lesbia were a couple united by their vocation for artistic creation.
She excelled as an engraver. The textures she achieved with her first multiple originals defined a very personal way of doing things. If reviews of that era are any indication, her work falls within to the New Figurative movement, which was making waves in the region and, of course, in Cuba in the 1960s. But Lesbia´s expressionism is one of a kind. She recreates her everyday world, household chores, her family routine; and the manual labor that gives a nostalgic twist to her work. Her works show a unique poetic intuition and a dreamlike inspiration that borders on surrealism, perhaps, influenced by Eduardo Abela. This was also evident in her painting, in which her keen eye for composition can be appreciated. Lesbia denies temporality and gives a touch of eternity to everything she creates. In a few words, everything she touches is born again.
In her latest works, particularly seductive are the small soft sculptures she wraps in tropical fruits, that remind us of the verses of Zequeira and Rubalcaba, all this placed inside exquisite little boxes drawn and carved with delicate finesse and the refined technique she has perfected over time. Modest, intelligent and sensitive, she has made a career that is an example of rigor and excellence. She is an exceptional curator who knows how to guide artists’ works in the arrangement of their exhibitions and the logic of their assembly.She is masterful in distinguishing what has quality and what does not. Enduring work everyone loves, that moves audiences with her good taste and mastery of textures and shapes. Lesbia is an all-around artist and her manual ability, as well has her spatial sense, make her a role model.
As it has been said before, her ability to give herself to others and to fulfill a mandate not all artists are willing to undertake is impressive: from her 40 years of dedication to the Casa de las Américas, as head of the Visual Arts Department, her work alongside Haydée and Mariano, to the summoning power of her exemplary leadership of the Visual Artists Association at the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC). And above all, her loyalty to revolutionary ideas and her homeland.
She embodies art and public service as one and her example will be extolled for generations to come. Lesbia teaches us that when one is an authentic artist and places their art above all things, the limits between the social being and the creator begin to fade.
All these reasons make Lesbia Vent Dumois unquestionable worthy of the National Prize for Visual Arts and, in her case, it is also an act of poetic justice. Better late than never. It has finally arrived.
