Guantanamo.- I noticed him moving up since I met him in Guantánamo, in the early 80s,p improving like the sunset, simple and at the same time a lot of blackslash, drawing with charcoal on cardboard drawings as elementary as they were hard-working, torn from within himself. Ángel Laborde Wilson was a pure man and an artist as a child, while he expressed himself with clarity, almost until his death that Monday, January 2, 2023, at 80 years old celebrated just a few days before, on December 18.
He is one of the Cuban visual artists treated as a Master of great standing, from end to end, considered, the art critic Jorge Núñez Motes, who shared personal and professional experiences with him. He was one of the student and teacher of the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in the capital, the José Joaquín Tejada Academy in Santiago de Cuba, and the Regino Boti Art School and the Academy of Fine Arts in his native Guantánamo.
He kept and displayed with visible pride, among various awards and texts written by him and others’ research, theory, poems…, as well as those, he won for his work, the symbolic Chinese lantern used by him, almost a child in the mountains as a Conrado Benítez brigade member, in the Literacy Campaign in 1961. It is a kind of educational start, prior to studying diligently and being one of the first graduates at the National School of Art, and specializing in ceramics at a Czechoslovakian higher institute.
His pupils continue to feel him, and for this reason, local and aboard creators appreciate his legacy as a draftsman, a painter, a ceramist, a sculptor, a person of enormous human values, for which he was, among artists and popularly, loved and respected.
“Mr. Artist. In difficult moments you are always there with your humility,” commented the promoter of Cuban visual arts, Vilmeydis Bombalé Laborde, upon learning of the death, according to the note from the National Council of Plastic Arts, while the renowned sculptor Juan Narciso Quintanilla Álvarez, recalled: “I regret the death of a great friend, he spent several years studying ceramics in Prague, while we, Villa (Soberón) and I studied sculpture.” The stage comedian and musical author Juan Carlos Aliaga dedicated compositions to him.
Maestro could be the title of the definitive portrait with a hat that his friend Cuesta painted for him, included in the iconographic exhibition dedicated to him displayed in the lobby of the Guiñol Theatre, at the recent Fiesta a la Guantanamera, a Labordian tribute by the cultural institutions of his land to his birth and death anniversaries.
It is also an echo of the broad and profound community work that bears the mark one of the undisputed founders of the Cuban Writers and Artists Association here, and as the first president of its Plastic Arts branch, or, before, at the country level of the Antillean Group, whose memory collects “his technical mastery and indisputable personal seal”, together with other recognized Cuban artists, in a fruitful decade, or with local artists, among those who decorated the carnival kiosks with their allusive caricatures…
He is recognized by the personal seal – lucky navigator of propitious media winds – of “painter of the shells”, for his female faces with malacological forms of Strombus giga, polymita or others of the species; among the best, that the high relief fountain that decorates a wall of the patio of the Danza Fragmentada Company’s. It includes only part of who is a genuine Creole representative of universal spiralism, who made “his spiritual and creative philosophy.”
“Always moving up, like the spirals of his shells with women’s faces, in movement, anointed by the circular mystery of his works, this is how he is still remembered in Guantánamo, his homeland, and in all of Cuba, his permanent inspiration,” noted the specialist Laura Jiménez Giráldez, summarizing the work of the life of Maestro Laborde, in the newspaper Granma.
He received, among others, the Raúl Gómez García Medal from the Culture Union, the Distinction for National Culture, La Fama, the highest distinction from the Assembly of People’s Power in his Guantanamo native land, and other awards, both inside and outside the country. From the edge of the wings of his hat, this Angel continues to deserve it.
