I have always believed that Alain Cabrera’s photography is a confessional gesture, where the artist is exorcised from the obstacles of language and the immediate circumstances to articulate a refined dialogue with the image; a super-communication where the body becomes text and cohabits with other elements that shape the visual fact. His young work collects rarities approaching common elements, in the interest of giving a new meaning and design documentation in which a vital story to be ostensible.
This has marked a meeting point between different of his series and some exhibitions like Todo lo sólido se desvanece, where the desire to intervene the snapshot enables his pieces going beyond mere documentation to move towards a dialectic in which the aesthetic distinctions are close to the pictorial and the performative -the series Mondrian en La Habana would also illustrate the above mentioned.
His recent solo exhibition, Diario íntimo (Intimate Journal), located at UNEAC´s Villena Hall, maintains interest for mixing opposite senses to recreate a semiotic where disparity and order, chaos and harmony, nudity and shelter alternate. But these snapshots are further distinguished by making visible the body as inhabited story in which a cyclic trajectory, marking a constant reencounter of the body with the body, with the intimacy of being is perceived. In this sense, snails appearing in the pieces, forming an extension of the fragmented physical, mark a time that simulates the binnacle alluded by Alain Cabrera in the title of the exhibition itself.
Snails inevitably linked to the human element in this set, suggest a house constructed by the body that takes its form from the inside and externalizes it in wear, the corrupted body. Thus these forms build the sharp contrasts that are inside the works; conflicting marks between small and large, between perishable and ephemeral. But we should also mention the alternations of light and shadow that lie at Cabrera´s pictures, resources that contribute to create atmospheres in these images, emphasizing their drama.
Meanwhile, the works Un lugar llamado Aquí and Piedras en el Camino show the body as a “pervaded space” where snails simulate a roundtrip path, an archipelago that awaits further visits. In this way, works as Poéticas del borde and Vivir la ilusión perdida reflect other senses of possession, linked in these cases to force, although the snapshots generally refer to a discourse of otherness in which the artist allows us to approach the intimacy of his look.
A melancholy and introspective feel oozes in this set of pieces. Treating the body as documentation of corrosion, coupled with the contrasts that the snails bring, become the works in grips of an increasingly distant privacy; the one that consists in bringing individuals to their own center, inviting them to rediscover their personal meditations.
Alain Cabrera’s photographs communicate other modes of undressing and writing everyday insignificance. They are invitations to exploration and to begin again; provocations to recycle the pages of an intimate journal.
