In the CEART (Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente), belonging to the Fuenlabrada City Council of Madrid, from November 5, 2015 to January 17, 2016, Ernesto Rancaño Vieites exhibits part of his most recent work in the exhibition entitled La carta que nunca te escribí (The Letter I Never Wrote You). The works there exhibited were expressly made for this exhibition and, according to the artist, they were also enriched and modified in the dialogue held with Spanish artist Chema Madoz, whose show coincides on the same space with that of Rancaño. La carta que nunca te escribí fundamentally includes installations, photos and intervened objects.
(…) Rancaño confesses he is a lover of art in general. And in his works he has always felt a greater influence from literature and music, much more than from the formal discourse of other artists. The music by Silvio, Serrat, Chico Buarque, the compositions of Sindo Garay and his form of telling the stories of the songs, the books by García Márquez and, above all, Vicente Huidobro. Those are the influences that have really transformed him. In this sense, he insists that in his works he had always done things the way he had interpreted them and, little by little, found his path.. But, for him, his style is lack of definition although, in my opinion, he today has a style so clear and eloquent that it is easy to recognize, even in this world of contemporary art where so many artists interweave with influences and ways that are similar to each other.
(…) Reflecting on what this year was for him, he remembers the exhibition which was part of Zona Franca in the Morro Castle during the Havana Biennial. In this occasion he presented the work Sombras del ayer (Shadows from Yesterday), a mixture of videos and objects and, in spite of it being a small exhibition and not of the most resounding, he defines it as a very important project. To finish this busy year, the trip to Sri Lanka is the result of an exhibition that took place in Havana more than three years ago. In this project, the works of more than twenty Cuban artists were gathered. Its title was Reflejos (Reflections) and was organized in 2011 in the occasion of the opening of the Sri Lanka Embassy in Havana, with Rancaño’s collaboration. And the culmination of 2015 has been an Artistic Residence held in Algiers. The purpose of this residence is an exchange in which not only visual artists meet, since there are also many other specialties of the world of culture represented.
When we were already leaving I asked his opinion on the prices of Cuban art today. This is a topic that occupies many social gatherings and conversations with abundant speculations. And, in his answer, an entire country was summarized: “the price of Cuban art does not correspond to reality. Away from Cuba, the world is different.”
