Lenin Cumbe

The Agustín Parejo School comprises a diverse and varied artists’ group which began in Málaga by carrying out a series of works and actions in response to the social, economic and cultural crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, applying a language that was sarcastic and chock-full of double meanings.
For the Plus Ultra art project, the collective created an installation in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla involving a fictional plot in which one of the group’s members travels to Ecuador, where they “discover” Lenin Cumbe, a self-taught painter who runs a pub full of unused televisions, filling their screens with paintings on current affairs issues. Within this fiction, the artist is invited to Spain by the collective, who become hosts on his visit to Seville and tour around the Expo ’92 facilities. Upon his return, Lenin starts painting television sets once more, where he conveys his impressions in a popular, tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the pomp of the Universal Exhibition, in addition to other daily scenes in Seville or news broadcasts on the TV channels of the time.
This self-fictional strategy, loaded with a critical and decolonial component, traces parallel plot lines with those generated by the fictitious artist Jusep Torres Campalans, invented by the writer Max Aub during his Mexican exile in the late 1950s.

José Manuel Lara