The mind is a muscle
Yvonne Rainer
(…) Against tropical messianism, Glenda León and Diana Fonseca reject religious transgressions (Belkis Ayón) or public defiance with media impact (Tania Bruguera). “That’s not for play!” They stray off towards a lyrical implosion requiring some imagination. Opacity seeks and achieves to displace folklore and pamphlet. As if the infra-level Duchamp would like to neutralize Beuys revolution, abolished by the scatological frivolity of his bastard children. The work by Diana and Glenda is not affirmative, denying the domestic clichés of art made by women who were too much women.
The “artifact as pretext” oscillating between what is palpable and what is intangible constitutes the axis of gestural subversion in La razón de lo irreal (The Reason of the Unreal, Villa Manuela, November-December 2015). Just as young curator Claudia Taboada Churchman suggests in her notes on the catalogue, the “rarity of what is known” is the triggering of a two-personal exhibition where the spectator—informed or casual—feels a fusion of compatible imaginaries. So, unity doesn’t make strength, but a dialogue ruled by a subtle complicity. All to reinstate a counterpoint between nature and craftsmanship, aura and void, moderation and comfort, what is trivial and what is virtual which transit from what is minimum to minimalism without a mood of identification or estrangement. A valuable lesson for alliances with a fleeting commitment. (…)
La razón de lo irreal (The Reason of the Unreal) marked its return to the elite circuit of Cuban art with sufficient spirit to present a slap on the back to disappointment. (…) The face or the mask of coldness or warmth emanating from bodies and souls is a mystery gravitating around the adventure of contemporary art. La razón de lo irreal proposes to go beyond the threshold of this labyrinth, ideal to leave misplacement and find renewed confusions. To comment on the unknown implies the risk of falling into the claws of erroneous certainties and legitimate misplacements. “Words, words, words”—a deceased infant would mutter returning from the imagined future fed up with unpleasantness. If now no one (or almost no one) squanders time in thinking (or rethinking) on art, at least there is the hope attempting to feel it alone with the illusory movement of a plant, the placidity of a gesture or the shaking of philosophical scaffolds. Down these paths diverging in the present dynamics, the visual work of Glenda León and Diana Fonseca wants to continue breathing between immaterial, political and commercial fundamentalisms.
