Balart- a friend

Looking at the painter Waldo Balart, one may be forgiven on getting his birthplace wrong the first time. Tall, with startling blue eyes, high broad forehead and unruly hair and beard, he looks northern European. And although he holds American and Spanish passports, it is his voice that gives him away and reveals where he spent his first twenty years or so, Cuba.
Born in Banes, Holguín, Cuba in 1931, he was the youngest of a privileged family who owned a large “finca” or ranch. His father served in the military and as the local mayor. Balart completed his degree in civic accounting in 1954 and did postgraduate studies in Political Science and Economics. When the family moved to New York in 1959, Balart took the opportunity to change his career and began to take art classes at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). He associated with “the avant guard” of the time and ended up acting (sometimes in the nude) in two of Andy Warhol’s films, The Loves of Ondine and The Life of Juanita Castro(1965). His artwork featured in several exhibitions in New York in the late sixties and early seventies. Married and divorced three times (but with no children) and limping as a result of a car crash, he uprooted himself once more and moved to Madrid.
When I met Waldo, he was living in a converted garage in the centre of Madrid full of books and paintings. Again his friends were made up of poets, painters, and designers who had no money but managed to live well nonetheless. He was an avid reader , had a sharp curiosity and liked to be exposed to different ideas. One Irish visitor to Madrid in the 80s said:
“Waldo told my fortune with I Ching coins. I had never heard of it before”.
In art, he has always remained loyal to constructive practice, a style that examines the relation between colour, shape (squares mainly) and space, language and science. Of an exhibition at the Edurne Gallery in Madrid in 1990, Balart commented:
“I’m showing my latest pictures and at the same time I’m revealing my personal reality. There isn’t any difference between my life and my art work”
I have seen him be extravagant with orange or purple but the colours in his paintings are, for the most part, strictly primary. His Cuban background may have influenced these bright geometric forms.
Never to pass up a good argument, Balart does not often talk about his native Cuba although he comes from a highly political family. Waldo prefers to go by the Catalan name of his mother, Balart. All the rest of his family take the names of both the father and the mother, which is a custom in Spanish speaking countries. That name is Diaz-Balart.
Waldo’s sister, Mirta Diaz-Balart, was married to Fidel Castro and they had a son called Fidelito (little Fidel). Waldo and his brother Rafael (who was a minister in Batista’s government) were friends of Fidel and his brother Raul. Their friendship was later broken over politics as was Castros’s marriage to Mirta. She divorced him in 1955 while he was in exile in Mexico. The whole family joined Mirta in New York in 1959 when Castro arrived to fight against the regime. Mirta eventually moved to Madrid where she remarried and had two daughters. Rafael moved to Miami where he campaigned relentlessly for a Cuba free from Castro. His children include two US senators, a TV journalist and a banker.
Waldo Balart may not be involved in politics but he keeps challenging society with his coloured squares. In his words:
“to accept a sense of aesthetics different to the traditional one means that you have to assume different responsibilities that lead you to new realities that are still unknown and for that reason they are threatening. “
Balart was talking about a response to his work not about his life or paintings, both which strive to constantly evolve. He will exhibit next March at ARCO, the international art fair in Madrid.