Making The Dream Become Reality

Enterprising Cuban makes the transition to Louisville and is named the 2010 Muhammad Ali Center artist in residence

Carlos Gamez deFrancisco moved to Louisville eight months ago with a limited understanding of English, but a great desire to make art.

 “I spent one month trying to translate my resume,” the 22-year-old native of Cuba said.

Community boosters trying to sell Louisville as “Possibility City” should put deFrancisco on their posters.

Less than a year after arriving in Kentucky, he is the 2010 “Dreammakers” artist in residence at the Muhammad Ali Center, where visitors can come see him work in an open studio at the center on North Sixth Street.  Gamez deFrancisco bested 49 other applicants for the residency, which will give him the resources to follow his dream, and the clout that comes with the Ali name.

“I try to move fast,” he said in an interview at the Ali Center, where his studio overlooks the center's outdoor amphitheater and fountains.

Gamez deFrancisco had been patient in the five years since his father, Louisville accountant and translator Carlos Emilio Gamez, began the complicated immigration paperwork before his son was the requisite 21 years old.

“Time, for me, is really important,” Gamez deFrancisco said. “I try to sleep just five hours” (a night).

He joked that he is taking his cue from Leonardo daVinci and trying to sleep less and do more. As soon as he had arrived, Gamez deFrancisco got down to the business of establishing himself in the art scene.

“I invested only in art supplies. I made a big production of pictures. … I was studying English, then I was understanding better,” said Gamez deFrancisco, who works weekdays in shipping and receiving at a local distribution company. “I knew about the LVAA (Louisville Visual Art Association) and I sent an e-mail saying I wanted to have an exhibition there. A member sent information on all opportunities in the city.”

His busy lifestyle caught up with him in October on a trip back to Cuba to get married. On his wedding day, he fell asleep and was two hours late for the ceremony. But, he noted, the mishap suited the humorous theme he had brought with him, a bit of American kitsch in the form of a cake topper that shows a bride hauling her groom by the collar to the altar. As a lark, the new couple also had wedding photos taken of Gamez deFrancisco being towed about by his new wife, Yudith. (In a bittersweet note, Gamez deFrancisco returned to Kentucky without Yudith, a 20-year-old dancer and psychology student; they won't be reunited until she can obtain immigration status.)

As for missing his wife and his native country, he shrugged. “I work too much,” he said. “I take classes and I paint. I don't have too much (other) time to miss it. … Almost every day I do work overtime to have more money. Then I have a half-hour to take a bath and go to school. I study English two hours a day.”

The plan is for him to work weekends on “Louis and the Revolution,” a satirical series about France's King Louis XVI (the monarch after whom Louisville is named, and who was infamously guillotined by his revolutionary subjects). It will be a creative “visual opera,” said John Faulkner, community relations manager for the Ali Center, who added that Gamez deFrancisco's style perfectly suits such a notion.

Gamez deFrancisco said he was inspired to become an artist after seeing a contemporary dance performance when he was 12 years old. After following that direction, including costume and set design, he began to study visual art. After four years, he went on to study under such prominent Cuban artists as Cosme Proenza, who paints fantastical gods and goddesses, and Harry Ruiz Moreno, whose surrealistic images evoke the uncertainties of life in Cuba.

Gamez deFrancisco, who also is a member of the Pyro Gallery on West Main Street and who is featured in a new exhibition opening Thursday, said he also has been inspired by Russian artist and theater designer Leon Bakst and portrait painter Valentin Serov, as well as Henri Toulouse Lautrec, Velasquez, Goya and Dali.

“I revolve around the stereotypes of human behavior that aroused in me an almost-morbid curiosity,” Gamez deFrancisco, a student of German Expressionism, wrote in his artist's statement.

“My figures, which seem to escape the laws of reason, of physics and biology, are only our alter-ego, usually friendly monsters, but monsters in the end. … I've tried to demystify the reality around me.”

By Diane Heilenman • dheilenman@courier-journal.com  • January 4, 2010