Felipe Dulzaides

According to the curator Rene de Guzaman, Dulzaides’ “videos depict simple acts recorded throughout time. The artist often appears as a central element in his work, but also employs rudimentary objects, which are used to create performative actions. These acts have a repetitive or singular quality designed to create a flow that sweeps the viewer toward some unforeseen artistic destination. As we watch his work unfold, what may appear to be an elementary act loses its simplicity and takes on breadth, complexity and associations that the viewer brings to the artistic experience.”

In Following an orange (1999), the video that marks the beginning of his oeuvre, Dulzaides sets an orange in motion rolling down the street. At the end of the one-minute orange's arduous ride, it manages to safely cross a busy avenue through the passing cars.

On the ball (2000), is one of the most exhibited videos. It explores a psychological state caused by cultural displacement. Video and media curator Rudolf Frieling stated: “Unedited and staged without digital processing, On the Ball presents the visibility of the face as a function of breathing. At the same time, breathing heavily on the camera’s lens plays on the function of the videotape, its reference to time. In this instance, allowing something to become visible also proves itself to be a dialectic process of obscuring and making clear”

Tony Labat, a mentor at the San Francisco Art Institute, wrote about his video work stating: “Mixing and manipulating performance, sound, sculpture and the theatre of the body, Felipe Dulzaides creates hybrid and personal compositions...like songs...riffs...improvisations...poetry in motion.”

Dulzaides’ work also explores the correlation between an individual and its context: the city. In San Francisco he used as his first studio a rooftop with an extraordinary view in the North Beach neighborhood. He titled it: “a studio without walls.” The two-channel video installation Dialogue with a Foghorn 1999-2002 presents on one channel, Dulzaides moving in circles riding a bicycle at dusk on a roof (a space without exit), while a separate video channel features him responding to a foghorn. Every time he responds to the foghorn with a whistle, he also illuminates his face with a flashlight thus establishing a visual contact with the viewer.

Havana is a city rich with a wide range of urban conditions. Dulzaides uses these as settings for a series of performed actions and straightforward documentation pieces based in observations. Eighteen reasons to cease making art (2007-2011) is a photo series that documents a variety of incidents in urban space that reference contemporary sculpture and installation art.

Dulzaides’ interest in tackling the city and public spaces compelled him to orchestrate several interventions and public art projects in different contexts. Double take (2004-2005) consisted of a series of eight site-specific billboards featuring a recognizable detail of the site. Each unannounced billboard appeared in the San Francisco downtown area. The essential is invisible (2005) consisted in the fabrication of an inflatable organ referencing the heart measuring 25 ft. long by 15 wide by 11 ft. high. Viewers can enter the piece through the aorta. Inside they encounter a translucent red space which jumps and move through the organ's chambers. When viewers are inside, the piece moves, the organism is alive. Viewers exit through another artery. Its title references the well-known phrase from the book The Little Prince. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

A matter of perspective (2019), sited on Havana's Malecón consisted of an installation of panels that fragmented the perception of the ocean and the city view. These panels, (usually used on construction sites) reference and question the recent spread of hotel construction in Havana's skyline.

Other process-oriented projects are account-based; a research method based on filtering the explored contents. In 2004 Dulzaides became engaged with modernist architecture for the trilogy of mixed media installations: Utopia posible (1999-on going). This body of work explores and exposes different aspects of the architecture of the unfinished National Art Schools of Cuba. The entire project departs from the very first installation, a simple gesture of cleaning a water channel so that the Next time it rains the water will run. As Utopia posible developed, so did meaningful friendships with the architects that designed these emblematic and controversial buildings: Roberto Gottardi, Vittorio Garatti, and Ricardo Porro. The gesture of cleaning grew into a research based mixed media document that captures and reflects philosophies of its authors as well as their struggle to conclude and defend their work. Recently Dulzaides has joined forces with a team of professionals in building conservation to find ways to conclude and preserve these architectural masterpieces.

The circle is a recurrent theme in his art due to his autobiographical experience of reentering meaningful scenarios throughout his life. A class trip to Havana in 1999 as a student of the San Francisco Art Institute and an artist's exchange program set him on that direction. For Dulzaides, the nature of the relationship an artist has with context shapes the tone of his work. That is why after completing the project Full Circle (2010–11) at the American Academy in Rome, he decided to base his studio in Havana. Full Circle, is a body of work developed which traces his experience of twenty years earlier in Italy when he abandoned the theater and decided to not return to Havana.

Dulzaides, has exhibited and developed many projects in Cuba. Flag my height (2007) is a neon piece featuring a Cuban flag measuring his tallness. Dulzaides believes that part of the role of an artist is also to articulate a critical perspective. His pieces reflect a balancing and bridging view. A billboard piece titled: All that we have been missing (2008) located in the highway Interstate 40 of Indiana, a state without a warm ocean and tropical beaches, featured two photographs back to back. One side showed the trace of a path in a blue sky. The second image featured a beautiful and warm sandy beach. The two snapshots were taken at a Varadero beach resort, where he spent the first ten years of his childhood. Works like this reinforce recent political ideas about dialogue and negotiation as a solution to the US-Cuba political conflict.

The project Felipe Dulzaides plays Felipe Dulzaides (2009-2017) looks into the life and work of his father from an inner perspective. His father was a musician and a mentor that played a key role developing jazz during the early years of the Cuban revolution. In that period the cultural authorities misjudged jazz. His latest project Centro Bahia (2014- on going) is at his studio, a restored space located in Regla, an area located across the bay from Havana. At his studio he is developing a flexible program that can accommodate residencies, exhibitions, lectures and events. Centro Bahia is a hub for developing experimental crossovers between art, ecological, urban, and community issues. Besides serving as his studio, it is a space dedicated to stimulate creative thinking.