Beyond the Boundaries of the Past

IN A 1987 PAINTING TITLED LOOKING FOR HOME, Cuban diasporic artist Alberto Rey visually collapses the geographical distances that separate Havana, his birthplace; Mexico City, where he and his mother and sister reunited in 1963 with their father, who had left the island ahead of the family and sought political asylum; Miami, where the Reys lived for a period of time as they made their transition into exile; and Northern Cambria (formerly Barnesboro), Pennsylvania, where he spent the majority of his early childhood and young adulthood. Like many of the works Rey produced during this period, Looking for Home explores the themes of rupture and displacement and possesses a maplike, albeit abstract, quality. Rendered in a palette that progresses from darkness to light, the work reveals a figurative form seemingly hovering above a series of colourful geometric shapes outlined and demarcated by black boundaries and dotted lines. According to Rey, Looking for Home (as the title suggests) visually represents an aerial view or vantage point from which he attempted to reconcile his parents’ experience of exile with his own vicarious response to multiple displacements and the loss of nation. “During the period when I did the painting,” the artist told me,