The weapons of Ileana Mulet

Arte por Excelencias rejoices with the appearance of the Armistice poetry notebook, by the plastic artist Ileana Mulet, by the publishing label Ediciones Unión, presented at the Rubén Martínez Villena Hall of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (Uneac) with the presence of Alberto Marrero, president of its Writers Section, Olga Marta Pérez Fernández, director of Union, and a large group of intellectuals and friends, among them were Jamila Medina, editor of the volume; Teresa Fornaris, who was director of the House of Poetry; and the narrator Daniel Díaz Mantilla.

When we talk about rejoicing, it is because Mulet is one of those artists who have earned their own space in our magazine. Not for nothing the cover of the number 48, dedicated to the 500th anniversary of the founding of the town of San Cristóbal de La Habana, and that will soon be circulating in its printed edition, is a work of the artist, the same as in an occasion, Master Harold Gramatges said: «Mulet, led by the hand of angels and demons, finds dream images that she captures in large spaces, where she mocks dimensions to group, overlapping them, solid stones, walls, streets, stairs, towers, windows, arches, bell towers and, sometimes, human and animal figures, opening spaces as if it brought to earth the infinite dimension of the sky ».

Armistice's poet, born in Holguin in 1952, studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts and is a specialist in Interior Design for Tourism, Cafes and Restaurants, and Television Costume Design. She has always cultivated poetry and plastic arts in parallel, and this volume of one hundred and twelve pages is proof of this, due to the profusion on the cover and inside pages of illustrations by Ileana.

In the words of presentation, the poet Teresa Fornaris also stressed that in the book all the senses are involved: «Certain letters jump from their common size, engages another typology appealing to the visual moment, at the moment of summations of meanings where shortcuts appear —paths- For those who travel to the deference of a particular form of language, as if it were a space to discover a figure in three axes that you find until you find your measure. In the most elementary is the deepest ».

The National Prize for Literature Reina María Rodríguez tells us in the prologue: «Ileana Mulet, author of other books such as Poems and paintings, I love the stone, Who knocks on the doors, has shown this time with her Armistice that she does not need to paint and add texts to his images, or vice versa, as may have been interpreted from her initial proposal, but the poems themselves have been turned into paintings, into stones. If something I wanted from poetry was, precisely, to convert images into texts, to achieve that transparency, its luminosity and a way of looking to see, and to see to feel, and to think later about what those colored scaffolds with imagination require to become concepts. Here, in Armistice, there is an efficient proof of the difficult possibility of putting them together ».