Rostro [Face]

A Santeria priest, painter, sculptor, and performance artist, Manuel Mendive has developed a distinctive iconographic language by fusing imagery drawn from Afro-Cuban religious belief systems with Western painterly styles and techniques. In his stone sculpture Rostro, the artist painted certain parts of its surface and added cowrie shells on top of the head, which in Cuba are considered the mouths of the Orishás, or Yorùbá deities. In all of his paintings, Mendive depicts the heads of his figures exactly the same way: as a half-moon shape in profile, precisely the same form as this sculpture, created with minimal intervention. This hand-painted, readymade sculpture is therefore iconic because it alludes symbolically to the origin of all of Mendive’s painted faces in naturally occurring shapes.