Cuba Up Close: Join us in February! 'Cuba Natural 'details below.
Cuba Up Close: Join us in February! 'Cuba Natural 'details below.
CUBA BEYOND MAMBO & ROCK ‘N ROLL is a curatorial project consisting of the works of three Cuban artists: Esterio Segura, Ernesto García and Ernesto René Figueroa. This traveling exhibition begins in Havana in the latter part of 2022. It highlights the traditional artistic forms of Cuban representation, always connected to the island’s natural features and political iconography.
In 2019, Esterio Segura began to develop the project, The Right Not to Say What I Think. Said project articulates the discourse about human rights that stem from a reinterpretation of published works. In doing so, it translates Ernest Hemingway’s theory of the iceberg -- key elements of a story or narrative should reveal themselves implicity -- to visual arts. This means that observers only glimpse the surface of a work and therefore must dig deeper to discover what lies beneath. What remains hidden in Segura’s works, like the content of the pages of a book, allow the spectator to fill in the missing gaps with her or his own conception of what constitutes rights. The project is divided into nine parts. Each one corresponds to the language that played a key role in the history of humanity: Spanish, English, Russian, French, Hindi, Braille and Chinese.
Segura’s proposal for this collective exhibition, Cuba Beyond Mambo & Rock ‘n Roll, presents works in Braille. The use of the visually impaired reveals what is hidden between the tangible and immaterial; recurrent themes in the history of art and literature. Tyranneus, the blind character in the celebrated Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, is relevant here because despite his inability to see, he has the power to know the future and see that which is hidden from others. Broadly speaking, that tension between what one sees and what is hidden becomes a metaphor for, on the one hand, how Cuba is represented globally and, on the other hand, the island’s political reality.
Ernesto García Nodarse's proposal in this collective exhibition is also about language and communication. His works are organized around modular pieces. Figurative character paintings are seemingly arranged to tell a story without fully clarifying the narration. The paintings are accompanied by contextual or temporal referencias connected to key moments in Cuba’s recent political history such as the faces of a couple who contemplate a news broadcast about re-establishing diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States. These political events are not explicitly represented but, instead, surface in an intimate way. Elements of formal drawing combined with codes of comic books characterize this visual expression.
Ernesto René Figueroa is the third team member in this exhibition. The artist includes drawings and sculptures that embrace warlike themes. His pieces of art are fully functional machines that range from an arte povera aesthetic (e.g., the use of readily available and low-cost items), and reflect the dynamics of the contemporary world. These sculptures are accompanied by detailed engineering drawings. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Figueroa’s works is the contradictions they highlight: functional machines but only within the space of an art gallery, as part of the logic of an art form. Set outside this setting, their purpose is meaningless.
The selection, organization, and presentation of this exhibit begin with the two-dimensional sketches of García which are then followed by Segura’s books. These works connect the two- and three-dimensional world. The curation culminates with Figueroa’s sculptures and gadgets. Not only is this assemblage a formal arrangement of these three artists’ works, but it emulates a conceptual journey that begins with Garcia’s subversion of traditional storytelling, continues with Segura’s breaking off of expectations surrounding the book as object, and culminates with the distressed concept of functionality that Figueroa articulates in his pieces. Cuba Beyond Mambo and Rock ‘n Roll is an attempt to discover connected vessels in a seemingly disjointed landscape.
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