Cuban artist Roció García currently has a solo show at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana to coincide with the Art Biennale. A graduate from the Academy of Arts in Leningrad in the 1980s, today she continues to pass on its invaluable legacy to her own students and challenge public taste with her sharp, provocative paintings.

“I tell my students if you want to learn to draw then I will teach you just like the Russians taught me”. It is an approach no longer dictated by Soviet ideology and today Garcia emphasises academic painting is about personal choice: “As a student studying art you need to be clear about what it is you want to do”.

Back in the mid 1970s, Roció García (b. 1955) was at the prestigious San Alejandro Academy in Havana, when she won a scholarship to study abroad. Initially it was to be Warsaw, but as the relations between Cuba and Poland took a turn for the worse, she suddenly found herself packing her bags to go to Leningrad. At the time for her Soviet Russia was a tabula rasa: “I wanted to leave the island; I was prepared to go anywhere” she recalls. She ended up staying in the Soviet Union for seven years, an experience which has shaped her life as an artist and is still tangible in her work today.

“Moiseenko, Moiseenko, Moiseenko”, she recites with a smile. By the end of their second year at the Academy of Arts students had to choose with whom they wanted to study and according to protocol had to put forward three choices. Evsey Evseevich Moiseenko (1916–1988) was already in his mid-sixties and an eminent and respected silver fox at the Academy of Arts. “He hardly took on any foreigners, but he accepted me after he heard I refused to apply to study under anyone else!”. He became García’s mentor and the two struck up an unlikely but warm rapport. She shows me a black and white photo of the building that was his independent studio in the large grounds and sculpture park of the Academy of Arts.

“I do not know how a critic or art historian would see it, I am not a theorist and have a visual approach to art so for me the academy was great, because there I learnt to do classical painting and I love the human figure and I have always used it in my art, both female and male. I am interested in how people interact physically and emotionally in a space, and I had to learn how to draw and freely depict the human figure in motion without using photographs, or models. By the time I graduated I could paint a body without having to even look at it”.

García emphasises that she is not an academic artist nor an idealist, and at the Academy of Arts in Leningrad even during the Soviet times, students were not told to paint in the strict style of social realism as people often like to think. It was an academy which, she believes “taught the principles of painting like in any other European art academy such as in France or Spain”. During the 1980s there were many international students at the Academy of Arts due to its generous scholarships. Throughout her years there, García travelled widely around the Soviet Union, to the Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, then north to Lithuania and later Finland, absorbing many artistic influences along the way. I ask who her favourite Russian artist is and unhesitatingly she says Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939) before later adding, Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), “It is hard to say if they had a direct influence on me but subconsciously, yes they did”.

She recalls her first winter in Leningrad. “The Neva was frozen over, I watched my friend crossing it and I was terrified, it was cracking in places but I stepped onto the ice, and it was incredible walking over a river like God!”. She went mushroom picking, amazed, the poisonous ones were red and white as if from a comic book, and the “ugly ones the most edible”. She learnt about tough socio-political realities which later came home to roost in Cuba. She recalls often visiting a café near the Academy of Arts where she sometimes saw fellow students trading in things, it was a black market. One of her Cuban friends said nothing like that would ever happen in Cuba, “and then it happened, and I think it was worse. There were shops which were closed down and you could only buy with certificates or dollars and that happened here in Cuba”.

We are chatting around her kitchen table, in a corner apartment in the artist district of Havana, a few blocks from the Malecon and far from the tourist melee in Havana Vieja. Surrounded by her paintings on the walls, with two exotic birds in a cage hanging from the ceiling, chirping constantly in the background of our conversation, Caribbean sunlight floods in from the windows on two sides. Spontaneously, I move from speaking Spanish into Russian, we exchange a few words, it may be rusty but I discover she still speaks the language, and a decade ago returned to St Petersburg (she always called it St Petersburg not Leningrad, even in the 80s), a city she loves. She has never shown her paintings in Russia, although she would like to stage an exhibition in the city that formed her artistic language. Neoclassical forms and architectural details, the texture of the city entering the fabric of her paintings, sculptures, busts as well as a classical sensibility to the human form itself are recurring stylistic elements firmly entrenched in her work decades later.

I think of her paintings hanging in the museum in the centre of Havana, the opening was two days before we meet and the large space packed full with the local art crowd of artists, directors, curators and the few intrepid international art aficionados and collectors who had flown in for the Biennale not bothered by the sporadic power outages and blackouts on the island (our hotel flooded during our stay and we were forced to decamp after walking down 24 floors in the semidarkness to the sound of flowing water, it felt like something out of the Poseidon Adventure). They are all large cinematic canvasses, with bold colours and razor-sharp themes, meditations around the play of power, populated with machos, geishas, smugglers, women held at gunpoint, two women making love on a bed, naked women in a beauty salon submitting themselves to the societal pressures to look like a model, and a series of paintings on the classical theme of Judith and Holofernes, the former imagined as a coquette, and Holofernes as a male dominatrix, before he is beheaded. Collectively they serve as a profane rolling hinterland to the title of the show, ‘Delirium Tremens’. I think about how people today live as if drunk on the power-games we play, whether as perpetrator or recipient of unconscious forces in our human relations on an individual and social and political level. Dare to take that power away and how do we cope with our freedom when it becomes a psychiatric condition?

At the exhibition one work stood out in particular: ‘La Espera’ painted in 1985 not long after her return to Cuba. It shows a woman reclining on a bed in an empty room, staring at a telephone in the corner, one of those cream-coloured Rotary style phones still fashionable in the 1970s with a long curly cable, a time before mobiles but with the same, familiar story: that feeling of sick excitement as you wait for your lover to call (will he/she won’t he/she?), a story often of unrequited love. “For me this painting is very important because it gave me my path and showed me where I wanted to go between Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Impressionism. I wanted to aesthetically combine Matisse with an impressionistic notion focussing on human beings situated in interiors with all their personal issues and internal conflicts. I like the strong colour of Matisse, and the chromatic relationship of the impressionists”. Her first real encounter with modern French painting was at the Hermitage, where it was compulsory for students at the academy to spend time copying the old masters. She remembers once choosing a painting by Gauguin, which turned out to be far more challenging than she had anticipated because of his idiosyncratic use of colour.

Our discussions about academic painting and the role that it plays in her art and teaching remind me of a talk I once attended at the Garage in Moscow a decade ago, a dialogue between the late Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023) and John Baldessari (1931–2020) two conceptual artistic giants of the 20th century. Ilya Kabakov spoke about how in his training he had a solid grounding in the principles of drawing. Baldessari had no such background, and both men, who came from different political systems had rather different experiences, and yet somehow their art had much in common too. García does not cede room in the debate, “Many people in the art world now tell me it is unnecessary and I am not questioning them, but for me it has aways been important and still is. Many problems that I see in art works are due to the fact that there is no solid composition or construction of space, or movement and rhythm. And conceptual artists say that it is not important, but I think even for them it can be useful, if you do not have this grounding what are you going to do – copy Marcel Duchamp? It is not so difficult”.