Josvedy Jove Junco —or El Sirio (The Syrian), as everyone calls him— took advantage of the infinity of time to live. Don’t laugh — looks can be deceiving. This man is not crazy; he just sees life from a different perspective.

 

A man who makes incisions on reality with angles we’re not used to seeing, but no less successfully. Stop for a moment at each virtual scene that El Sirio is able to recreate in words and quite possibly, you will find yourself looking at the world with different eyes.

Perhaps he is showing us a threshold not everyone is able to traverse, but that leads to the paradise many religions speak of, where time is experienced differently, there are no borders, no death, and loneliness doesn’t exist.

 

El Sirio is smarter than everyone is because he beat frustration. He is, there’s no doubt it, a poet, novelist, journalist, gardener, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, orthopedic, polyglot, surgeon, lawyer, interpreter, anthropologist, philanthropist, lycanthrope, ancient time-traveler, prisoner, millionaire, immigrant, migrant, emigrant, ambassador, Dutch, Ethiopian, British, from the Cuban provinces of Pinar del Rio and Holguin, film critic, actor, film director, crazy, Syriann and an artist. He erased each of his disappointments and replaced them with whatever he wanted. He’s lucky. He paused on the line between sanity and madness and he’s fully aware of both conditions.

 

Sometimes, he is 34.5% mad combined with 25% of sane and the rest is freedom. Other times, this 25% sanity becomes clarity, he transforms the 34.5% into paranoia, and the rest is caution. The formula varies. There may be a 27.5% of naivety mixed with 15.8% tenderness, 46% craftiness, and the remainder, sadness.

 

Art Brut Project Cuba and RIERA STUDIO are just one step in his upward artistic career. After years of being misunderstood, of prowling the vertical asphalt that Alamar (a town in the outskirts of Havana) imposes with its architecture, the artist has found the place he needed in order to be recognized.

 

So then, curators, sponsors, critics, psychologists, artists, writers, politicians and general public, the only thing you need to do is enjoy this opportunity and drink from this creative source.

 

Maria de los Angeles Matienzo, writer and journalist.