HAVING related to Cuba for more than 10 years, Gérald Mouial (Algeria, 1942), a notary by profession, has become a fervent admirer and promoter of the island’s culture. Thus, this Latino-African, as he likes to define himself, art collector, photographer and writer, has initiated and taken part in exhibitions by Cuban artists in France and the French islands in the northern Caribbean. He is also the author of various books on the island.

Arte mágico en Cuba (Magical Art in Cuba, Editorial Arte Cubano, 226 p.) one of those volumes, is a beautiful and interesting approach to a virtually unknown area of contemporary Cuban art. More than a catalogue, it is a panorama, a fresco that discovers as if on a tour of the entire island 501 naive, popular, primitive, ingenuous, intuitive, spontaneous painters. It is a notebook that includes interviews – in the form of monologues – with the selected artists, as well as a whole gallery of color reproductions of some of their works.

Campesinos, teachers, construction workers, carpenters, mechanics and electricians recount in these pages their realities and anguishes, their illusions and fears, their joys and hopes. And they also tell how form and color have become testimonies of their own vital experiences. As critic and art historian Orlando Hernández writes in the book’s prologue, it is about "making us enjoy a huge group of paintings and in passing, to make us aware through the words of their own creators, the truth of their lives, which is like showing us the secret place from where their beauty spills out."

A good art book is always an inexcusable invitation to please the senses. Arte mágico en Cuba demonstrates – in the words of poet and essayist Rafael Acosta de Arriba, president of the National Visual Arts Council – a work of incomparable beauty, a veritable gift for lovers of Cuban art and magical art in general. A volume which, by proposing a unique view of a museum disseminated throughout the island, becomes a notebook to see and learn of an unknown part of contemporary Cuban art.

It was the works of another two painters, as the author confides, that motivated Gérald Mouial to investigate and inquire into the manifestations of popular Cuban religion. Based on his approach to the genesis and development of beliefs and cults that have been practiced on the island for centuries, he wrote the notebook La santería, religión popular cubana (Santería, Popular Cuban Religion, Ediciones Unión, 64pp), accompanied by the illustrations of Lawrence Zúñiga Batista and Santiago Rodríguez Olazábal.

The proposition of this book is not to theorize on santería. Meticulous researchers throughout history, such as Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera and Miguel Barnet, have devoted themselves to that end with determination and diligence. Mouial attempts and succeeds in presenting the essential coordinates for knowing and understanding that phenomenon. Thus, in a synthetic manner, he approximates that vast universe and incorporates other elements – including the characterization of the orishas and the addresses of museums and institutions related to the subject – that contribute to the enrichment of the volume as a whole.

"On my first visit to Cuba in 1988," Mouial recounts, "I perceived the omnipresence of this popular religion, but could not find any simple explanation capable of satisfying my curiosity without entering into the mysteries of mysticism and its eroticism. These men and women dressed all in white that we see on the streets, the little statues, the colored necklaces ostensibly worn, the obsessive music of the drums, the coconuts behind the doors of the houses, the dolls enthroned in living rooms, the numerous offering bowls adorning the altars decked with candles and glasses of water, agitated me to the point of wishing to discover for others the rituals and customs of a specific belief of this country."