Michael Sastre:
Recent Work, The Rafters Series
By John B. Henry, Director of the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan and previously Director of the Vero Beach Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, Florida
The pictorial kinship of Sastre’s paintings have to the recent diaspora of refugees from Cuba and Haiti is coincidental. Sastre, who was born in 1961 of Cuban parents, had heard accounts of people tossing themselves into the sea all his life. The stories of his childhood- of leaky fishing boats loaded with fish, shark attacks and of some fishing boats not returning to port at all- came back into focus for Michael Sastre in the Krome Detention Center in Miami. For nearly six years, Sastre taught English and art at Krome while maintaining a studio in Miami.
“My mother grew up in Cojimar, Cuba where Ernest Hemingway visited and lived periodically, during a time when there was a boom in the fishing industry.” This meant anybody willing to risk their lives at sea (many of them in small boats) could share in the opportunity. At Krome, Sastre’s childhood memories of tales of life and death dramas set against the beautiful Caribbean backdrop resurfaced as he learned of the extraordinary risks taken by so many Cubans and Haitians who faced the perils of the sea. “As long as I can recollect, I’ve heard first-hand accounts by people who have crossed the Florida Straits on a raft, others who have run into trouble while fishing or pleasure boating, and still others who have gone to deliver guns to Central and South America and smuggle drugs on the return trip by either plane or boat. At the moment, I feel I have too much invested in the region not to use these stories as subject matter.”
Michael Sastre’s paintings are first and foremost paintings in the romantic tradition. Like the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, these works emphasize the emotional and imaginative appeal of what is heroic and adventurous. They idealize the common man and exalt nature, the exotic and the remote. Stylistically, Sastre relies on the techniques of applying paint and arranging composition that his nineteenth century predecessors used. Exaggerated lighting conditions, strong atmospheric and coloristic effects, and unnatural perspectives and asymmetry are devices he uses to place the viewer between the painter at his easel and the subject of the painting.
Subjectively, the canvases are staged performances of dramatic courage, fate and hope played out against the vast spacial backdrop of the sea. His characters are anonymous and archetypal, their features and distinguishing characteristics too generalized to determine any former rank or class. They represent the existential “everyman” adrift in the universe and whose fate rides on the currents and winds. They are portrayed in moments we can only imagine- moments of despair which must precede any final hour before rescue or disaster. They are reminiscent of what Winslow Homer said about his painting , The Gulf Stream: “This is what the voyage of life comes down to: facing death when hope is gone and there are no witnesses.” Like Homer, Sastre has no heroes leading the charge. The stories he tells have no endings either. This is because, for Sastre, the subject of man adrift on the ocean is metaphorical of the painter in the studio: a singular, courageous commitment to be alone, cut off and resigned to spend monotonous hours in front of the canvas, in search of landmarks and, all the while, affected by the currents of the times and the winds of the critics.