Castro, No! Sex Si : Exiled in Florida, Cuban artist Tomas Esson remains uncompromising in exploring aggressive, brazen sexuality in his work

If only Tomas Esson would lighten up, he has been told repeatedly, he could be a major success. In Cuba, paintings that combined politics and sex in grotesque caricatures of hallowed revolutionary symbols eventually led the government to all but invite him to defect. Two years ago, he did.

Here in the United States, Esson is no longer preoccupied with taking satirical swipes at Cuban culture, Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, but sex remains a dominant theme, and his images are scatological, brazen and provocative.

“My works are hard to sell,” Esson said recently during an interview in his South Beach studio. “I have made a conscious decision to work with sex aggressively, a topic that is the most complex in the world. I want to provoke a reaction from the viewer. I want the spectator to go inside himself, to examine the hypocritical mentality about sex.

“I cannot choose to make my art beautiful for the people.”

Still, almost in spite of his subject matter and aggression, Esson may be on the verge of major success, among the most celebrated of a handful of young Cuban artists in exile from what has been called the “Generation of the ‘80s.”

Born after Castro came to power in 1959, these artists were given a classical academic education in the arts while being schooled in a socialismo that backfired as repression of artistic freedom increased. Now these Cuban defectors are poised to change the direction of art outside their Caribbean nation.

Esson, who will turn 30 on Feb. 8, is among four painters trained in Cuba’s state-run fine arts schools whose works are to be exhibited in “4 Cubans Today,” opening at the Iturralde Gallery in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

“He’s in the middle of a Cuban boom,” says Miami art historian and curator Giulio Blanc. “He has attracted enormous attention.”

In the last year Esson has been featured in a Newsweek magazine spread on Cuban painters, “The Next Wave From Havana,” and received a $5,000 commission to create an ad for Absolut vodka. In 1991, his paintings were included in museum exhibitions in Amsterdam; Caracas, Venezuela; Monterrey, Mexico; Aachen, Germany, and Budapest, Hungary, and he has traveled widely in Europe, enjoying, he says, “a life of independence and an access to information.”

At the same time, Esson has found a home amid a Miami Beach renaissance of arts, culture and night life that has sprung up on the seaside fringe of an urban area that often seems driven by overheated exile politics. In greater Miami, where Cuban-Americans now constitute the majority, Fidel Castro remains a local issue, and until recently the debate over which artists either had or had not sufficiently distanced themselves from the Communist regime has been punctuated by bombs, death threats and artworks torched in the street. So far, Esson has managed to stay out of the nonstop ideological war that is 4 years older than he.

He is concentrating instead on learning English and stretching his artistic reach on canvases that are as large as his ambition.

“I would like to be among the 1,000 most important artists in the world,” he says with a directness that seems more youthful vigor than pretension. “In Cuba, that would not have been possible. But here I think it is.”

Known for his disciplined work habits and an imagination that runs headlong to the fantastic, Esson in his latest paintings has already veered away from Cuban iconography and social criticism to more universal themes. But phallic imagery, a bizarre sexuality and a high shock quotient remain.

Blanc says he sees “the influence of the new graffiti and expressionism” in Esson’s work, along with “a lot of anger, irony, and black humor. His work is difficult--it verges on the pornographic--but it’s strong and authentic.”

Ramon Cernuda, a Miami businessman and prominent collector of Cuban art, agrees: “His paintings are not easy, to say the least. He has not made a concession to the market. His work is not decorative.”

Indeed, as Miami gallery owner Fred Snitzer, who represents Esson, puts it: “Esson’s work separates the speculators from the collectors. Short of hiding his paintings under a bed, there is no way speculators are going to spend the money his work commands--in the $8,000 to $14,000 range--and not hang it. If you want Esson, you have to buy the tough stuff.”

Among the toughest stuff are “Mi Homenaje al Che (My Homage to Che),” a 1987 work in which a monstrous bearlike figure is copulating with a woman in front of a portrait of Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary hero, and “Que Calor! II (How Hot It Is!),” a 1991 oil and charcoal on canvas in which a fan is blowing on a naked woman with her legs spread.

Other recent works depict half-man, half-beast figures with severed limbs, mythological puns, flags made of bleeding flesh and excretory functions. “My main concern is for my work to become more defiant and disturbing,” Esson says.

After several trips abroad, he left Cuba for good in November, 1990, eventually announcing his defection seven months later while in Boston. The decision to leave Cuba, where his family remains, was painful but inevitable, he says: “It was a critical point in my career, and my family has always supported me.”

Esson was born in 1963, four years after the revolution that toppled Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and brought Castro to power. Esson is one of five children of first-generation Cubans--a brick mason and a seamstress whose parents were English speakers from Jamaica.

Under the rigorous state-run Cuban educational system, Esson’s artistic talent was recognized early, and from elementary school on he was afforded the best of Cuban training. He attended both the Academia de Artes Plasticas San Alejandro and the Instituto Superior de Arte. “I appreciate the education I received in Cuba,” he says. “I had 12 years of free classes with wonderful teachers.”

Esson was awarded his first one-person exhibition in 1987, and he began to win both attention and prizes. But in works that dealt with what he perceived as the double standard in Cuban society, he also began to push the limits of what the Castro regime would allow. With his 1988 exhibition at the Centro de Arte in Havana, he and the limit collided.

Among the works in that exhibition were “Mi Homenaje al Che” and “Cuba Champion!”--a depiction of a red-uniformed baseball player with a beast’s head that the artist intended as an attack on the machista Cuban society represented by Castro’s favorite sport.

On the day the exhibition opened, Esson says, he received a visit from Armando Hart, the government’s longtime minister of culture, who lectured Esson on the treatment of Cuba’s patriotic symbols.

“He asked me, ‘Why do you mix sex and politics?’ ” says Esson, who replied: “Sex and politics have always been a topic of the arts.”

But Hart was not mollified. Esson was asked to remove the offending works. He refused. The exhibition, scheduled to run one month, was closed after being open only 10 hours.

In 1991, after he defected, Cuban authorities also exerted political pressure to have his paintings removed from group exhibitions in Amsterdam and Mexico.

Of those days, Esson now says, “I was completely naive. I had no political intentions. From the age of 14 I was a member of the Union of Communist Youth. I had no contacts with the human rights movement. I did not set out to destroy the government, make a big scandal or put down the bureaucrats and functionaries. They were always asking me, ‘Tomas, what do you want to say?’

“I was simply trying to comment on the double standard in Cuban society, where some people have access to cars, big houses, good restaurants, but most do not.” For a while, as a rising star on the Cuban art scene, Esson himself was afforded such privileges. “I would come home from some dinners and tell my father what I ate, and he couldn’t believe it,” he recalls.

It was then, he says, “when I stopped believing in the revolution.”

After his defection, Esson says, he was warned of Miami’s reputation for intolerance, and the riptide of anti-Castroism that has made the city seem inhospitable to many artists, dancers and musicians who have deserted the island in the last decade.

But Esson is determined to resist being drawn into any ideological camp, or even to be seen as an artist within what he calls “the Cuban ghetto.” He has avoided being drawn into the continuous anti-Castro harangues on Spanish-language radio and has even turned down an offer to put his work in a group exhibition at the decidedly liberal Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture.

Carlos Luis, a member of the museum’s board of directors, said Esson’s refusal to exhibit at the museum “makes me wonder about his rebellious attitude.”

“There is some risk involved with exhibiting at the museum, and many painters see (exhibiting there) as a threat to their potential commercial success.”

With his liberation has come money. Esson’s works are beginning to sell, says gallery owner Snitzer, and the artist himself lives comfortably with what he calls “all the American gadgets.” Recently he even acquired a silver 1987 Porsche, swapping a painting for it, even up.

Esson’s next goal is to be invited to exhibit at the prestigious art fair this summer in Basel, Switzerland. That would boost his career to the next level, he says.

“I feel big pressure,” he acknowledges. “I tell myself, ‘Tomas, you have to paint really good. You have to have good ideas.’ This is the big challenge. It’s like trying to play in the big leagues, and it’s not easy.

“But every day I learn something. I just hope I have the time to do all the things I want, and to get all the things I want. But in five years, it could be incredible, no?”