Gloria de la Caridad

The work of Gloria de la Caridad (Havana,1958) is closely linked to the domicile, to the materials – cardboard, magazine clippings, nail painting, textiles, homemade rubber – that she finds around her.

With them she builds anthropomorphic collages on a human scale that she obsessively fills with figures. Some of them are feminine (smiling faces taken from couché paper), but there are also masks of primitive resonances, devils and an endless number of decorative motifs that she draws with meticulousness.

She unites all these figures with representations of chains, shells, letters and numbers with which she creates electrifying compositions of marked horror vacui. Imagination and freedom overflow all these silhouettes that she stores with care in a friend's house, protecting them from the precariousness of her own home, full of leaks in a period of storms.

Self-taught, she embarked on different careers – Mathematics, Chemistry, Law, History – without finishing any. The loss of her father pushed her to the limit and led her to try to take her own life, so she was admitted and in treatment for several years. It is the postcards that her mother gave her as a child and her father's books, together with her taste for drawing, that helped her build the overflowing “imaginary” that characterizes her work today