Cuban Art Brut creator, born in 1970 in Havana.
Life
Damián Valdés Dilla left school at seventeen because of serious psychological disorders; schizophrenia was diagnosed in adolescence. Under treatment, he held various jobs, irregularly. After the failure of his marriage he went back to live with his mother in a small flat in Alamar, a dormitory suburb of Havana made up of five-storey Soviet-style blocks.
A convert to Islam, which he has adapted to his own philosophy, he always carries a Koran, a prayer mat and a prayer cap.
The work
He began by building models of cities from small pieces of wood, then, as wood became hard to find, from salvaged materials: buildings, towers, blocks of flats and a whole fleet of flying machines assembled from scraps picked up in the street, perhaps intended to save his island, which he depicts as sinking.
Since 2014 he has been drawing, in ballpoint pen, meticulous and orderly cities, the opposite of the disorder of his assemblages: tightly packed towers topped with pyramidal roofs and clocks, monumental metropolises with fantastical perspectives, vehicles of every kind (aeroplanes, helicopters, ships, buses). No human figure ever appears.
Exhibitions and collections
- Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne: Sans titre, 2015, ballpoint pen on paper, 40.5 x 100.8 cm; exhibition “Art Brut CUBA”, 6 December 2024 to 27 April 2025.
- Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou: untitled assemblages (c. 2000) from Bruno Decharme’s abcd collection, donated in 2021.