Who was Omar before, at the beginning of his art?

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I do not know when or where my love for art started. It was strange. I come from an extremely poor family. We used to live on the street and my mother begged for food to feed her nine children. Our father abandoned us and we did not have anything. A sick childhood. I think my asthma started there. Once I got a transfusion but I can´t remember exactly why. I stayed many times at orphanages, charity homes and the like. It was during that time of my life that I started feeling inclined to art, almost like a divine gift. I used to build my toys out of match boxes and I created my installations. Children however were rather cruel and many times I lived in a hostile environment.

 

Besides, the situations at the orphanages were not always good. At night we did not even have water. My fantasy started in that context. I started drawing. It was like a lifesaving method, it helped me escape from hostility. Suddenly the children around me were surprised with my drawings and this made me well known and got me safe out of the storm 

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In general, food was bad, and we were punished. At one of the orphanages, the Jesuits (as far as I know they were Jesuits) beat me, especially one of my instructors. Once he locked me in a dark room and then I became claustrophobic. I cannot understand how people who are so cruel with children can become teachers or instructors. One of my brothers managed to escape from an orphanage. He became a poet. The orphanage was in Cojimar. It was 1961 or 1962.I think Hemingway still lived there before he supposedly committed suicide that Sunday morning of July 2. I remember my mother was always ill. So this was the context of my first steps as an artist. 

You mention those years, so did you live the political transition of Cuba towards socialism?

 

I lived that transition right there. At the orphanage. I saw the changes on TV. But I felt the euphoria of the moment. There was a literacy campaign, people chanted slogans. Then the Girón invasion took place. Everything floated in the air and spread to other areas. You mentioned the movie of Tomás Gutiérrez, based on the book by Edmundo Desnoes. In my opinion, what is reflected in Memories of Underdevelopment is something else, a different vibe. Of course, Memories is an excellent film, but in fact, most people lived that time with euphoria, not like that role of the bourgeois, played by Sergio Corrieri. From those years I also remember the October crisis and the missiles.

 

I started working when I was a child. Everything that was sold at the shops was out of my reach. My mother started a relationship with a builder, also illiterate. We received a wooden shed at Los Pinos, La Habana. Conditions were very basic, my stepfather earned very little but at least we had a roof over our heads. It was better than living in the streets or at orphanages. 

As I said, I started working. I helped my stepfather collecting scrap. With the money I earned I bought some stuff. I always wanted to buy music instruments. 

 

What do you miss?

 

Once I wrote a poem: “I am the boy I never was”. I have always wanted to go back to the past. To reshape it. That past that is a present. If I could, I would go back to my puberty age. I had a huge artistic potential that could not be developed then due to lack of resources. I had to work at laundries. I also have a degree as operator of steam boilers. Life can be horrible. I miss what was never there but could have been mine. 

I understand you have a very poetic vision of your pictures. Where does your relationship with poetry come from, Omar?

 

From home, when we had a proper house in downtown Habana and not a shed.

My brother who was a poet, but also bohemian, met at a funeral house with other intellectuals. I don´t know why there, because the coffee shop was open all day and all night. But well, afterwards they met at home. Among his friends was Reinaldo Arenas. He used to stay at home too.

He went to jail together with my brother. In that house I used to make installations so that poets could write their poems on the walls. Those were endless and pleasant nights. 

 

Part of the film Océano, directed by Mikhail Kosyrev-Nesterov was filmed at that house. You see, the sea appears again!

It was a Russian movie with Cuban actors that touches topics such as homosexuality, poetry and intellectuality. I think I appear in the credits too, but I did not act, I just helped with the translations. There was never a detachmentnreally, neither from the poetry nor from the sea. 

How was your academic training in painting?

 

I joined San Alejandro in 1969 to study painting. Francisco Goya recommended the creation of this school. I also studied sculpture and engraving. As from second year you had to choose one of these disciplines. I was awarded prizes in engraving and my teachers recommended me to take sculpture, but I chose painting. I had a track record in painting before I joined the school. I also knew a lot about art criticism, contemporary art, I was a self-taught. I was very interested in Picasso, I was attracted to his vibe, I don´t know exactly why. I painted a series of deformed horses that had a lot to do with one part of his creation. 

 

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What are the referents of the works of art of Godinez?

 

​I have always been absolutely modern. I was modern before joining San Alejandro. I went to the National Library, to the House of Americas and I looked for books about Modern Art criticims. I gained a lot of information from different referents: Formalism, Materism, all of them abstract expressionists, Pop art. I started organizing symposiums about art criticism, but I also studied the works of Kant, Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, Dostoievski, I contacted the avant garde of Cinema, Tarkovskiy, Agnes Barda, the Polish cinema, the Czech avant garde, Fellini. All the movies I watched in neighborhood theaters. 

 

My family had friends at the Colon neighborhood, one of guapos, previously with a history of prostitution. A red district. There they asked me to paint Afrocuban saints, yorubas, and I learnt a lot from them. However, I reflected all that syncretism of Cuban religions much later in my paintings. I made a series called “Offer” with conceptual repertoires of the Afro-Cuban mythology. 

 

Santería definitely marked me, of course, it was something very latent in my neighborhood. I did not show it in my work then, but it was later, when I left Cuba, that I started to use this kind of elements, that have always lived inside me.