Turning a criminal vice into a virtually profitable product generated the idea of transforming the Galería Servando Cabrera Moreno into a boutique or, rather, into its parody. This small place located in the Havana neighborhood of Miramar is part of what used to be a department store in the fifties. Therefore, the former Ten Cent store in La Copa served as the stage for Lorena Gutiérrez to materialize one of the collateral exhibitions during the Twelfth Havana Biennial (May-June, 2015).
Upperworld (2015), Lorena’s exhibition, shaped an environment as site specific, where she put on the same level the structure of “unnamed positions” of an advertising campaign launched within four walls of minimal premises. Thus, what was really dark became enjoyable for those who accepted to wear a white collar and pose in front of a camera. In a relaxed evening, the perverse emblem reverted into a new fashionable accessory, attainable for spectators at the opening who were interactive and lack of prejudices.
The Great Absurd of a disguised justice with the pleasure of the artistic show was represented by some manikins as trophies of that “black figure” due to the vice of using pink jackets in terms of high range frauds or embezzlements. One of these manikins stopped in the space could be the “invisible leviathan,” who remained safely and happily unknown before the impossibility of someone pointing him with the finger.
Nothing is as comforting for a megalomaniac as forging the illusion of being untouchable. Sustaining a cool passion with its dose of ambivalent glamour to sketch an advertising Matrioska was Lorena’s intention when combining art, justice and power. Upperworld became a “built situation” with light panoptism, an action destined to aestheticize disciplinary pleats gilded by the pill of a vulgar marginality, inept to support the weight of the blame.
