When every movement in the artistic panorama of today’s Cuba is presented from a more or less declared will to impact, the calm gesture of discoursing in a low voice creates uneasiness in the person who is listening. (…) Perhaps because of this sort of démodé habit, escaping from reflexive areas and easing in what is experiential, when I entered the show A este lado del paraíso (This Side of Paradise), 1 the echoes of a gesture with a clear modernist nuance came to my mind.
(…) Although a certain utopian vocation, perhaps connected with that spirit of irreverence and alternativity of the eighties, was expressed, the syntax of the exhibition rather pointed to the postmodern ways to face what is real. (…)
Apart from an epochal look insisting in the withdrawal of the subject to areas of disconnection with reality, some positions (certainly more than those explicitly stated) comment on the latency of creative resistance drives. The will to generate areas of disagreement of their own is positioned halfway between the collectivist effervescence of the eighties and the ostracism of the nineties. This present tactic, perhaps because of being inserted in a heterodox contemporaneity full of contradictions, is a mixed resource in which only individual initiatives have room. Therefore, intimate space acquires a prominence that had been denied to it or it rejected as its own decision.
(…) A este lado del paraíso is a call to diversity (presented on the media and on plastic languages, but also from the visited subjects and the discursive ocuses assumed) and, on the basis of diversity, it shapes its curatorial text. It, however, stops in that irrepressible attitude of our productions (or of a large part of them) of looking around and trying to revitalize the conscience with individual drive as a basis. When we have discovered that it is impossible to leave the mechanism behind − that it effectively is the beginning and the end − there is no other remedy, so as not to lose our way, tan erecting propinquities, vanishing lines.
- Group show inaugurated last June 6 in El reino de este mundo Gallery of the José Martí Cuban National Library. The show was curated by Darys J. Vázquez and Sandra Sosa and gathers twenty-three artists: Yunior Acosta, Alejandro Campins, Javier Castro, Rigoberto Díaz, Reinaldo Echemendía, Diana Fonseca, José E. Fuentes JEFF, Fidel Cargía, Luis Gómez, Ricardo G. Elías, Alejandro González, Jesus Hdez-Güero, Joshué H. Pagliery, Orestes Hernández, Dennis Izquierdo Ernesto Leal, Yornel Martínes, Yusniel Mentado, Pedro Pablo Oliva, Eduardo Ponjuán, Adislen Reyes, Lázaro Saavedra and José A. Toirac.
