De Armas, le dernier Taino - La Vie et l'Œuvre de l'artiste cubain Jesus Gonzalez de Armas

This film presents a portrait of a great Cuban artist, Jesus Gonzalez de Armas, who is currently living and working in Paris. His paintings and sculptures find their unique inspiration in the aboriginal Circum-Caribbean Taino culture. Through a highly individualistic vision, yet steeped in a tradition that has surprisingly survived century. De Armas identifies with the moral dilemmas connected with the extermination of the Tainos, among other New World populations and cultures. His art dramatises with unusual passion, lucidity, and energy the realms of ritual and sacrifice, massacre and virtual obliteration of one world by another. This astonishing encounter and mutilation of our history finds a counterpoint in the artist'sown physical challenges. He was born one-armed-a fact which, according to Taino religious, meant both doomed and touched by divine grace. Fascinating character and artist of many sides and talents, De Armas has excelled in animation (a field he pioneered in his native Cuba), as film director, draftsman, painter, sculptor, writer, musician, and ground-breaking researcher in the field of speleology. Artistic creation is for him incessant experimentation and restless search. Along with the artist's profile, four noted personalities in the art world in France add their candid appraisals of the artists, his craft, and his place in the contemporary art scene