“Luis Cruz Azaceta: Painter of Exile,” Preservation in Print
Luis Azaceta, a warm and rational Cuban exile, doesn’t strike you as a man who would ever hold a gun or a knife to his own head or the head of anyone else. But he has done this. He tells the very funny story of posing before a mirror in his New York apartment with a gun and then a knife held to his head to get the right image for a painting dealing with urban violence. A woman in a nearby apartment in his Italian neighborhood observed him through the window and sent someone rushing to the rescue. It’s an amusing tale, but behind the humor is the ever-present specter of loss, chaos and alienation that has defined his work for the last thirty years.