Trying to peer into the camouflaged inner workings of subjects and objects and deconstructing their essences is a highly problematic thing among this postmodern world, staunch defender of the simulation, brightness, image saturation and hedonism. It is aimed precisely around this area an aesthetic proposal is currently undergoing a process of constant maturity. I refer to the work of the young artist Yomer Montejo, who revealed some of his works in the exhibition El objeto como consuelo held in the Fresa y Chocolate Cultural Center as part of the collateral activities to the 14th ICAIC Young Filmmakers Festival.
The pieces shown in this exhibition, as all the work of Yomer, enjoy their own aesthetic idiolect as appropriate the method of radiographic photo to make purely artistic purposes. With this technique, which is well known since he worked as x-ray technician for two years, he can use “penetrating properties of electromagnetic radiation to study the internal structure of the bodies.” Because this type of proceeding in his works the human figure loses its traditional appearance. Costumes and accessories: the paraphernalia that accompanies man disappears. Even meats are eliminated. Only relevant is the bone aspect of the subject, revealing the interior, the rugged areas, the grotesque and repulsive human existence halo that the epidermis has managed to hide so well.
The artist uses this same operation to intervene objects accompanying the person in his daily life: the toy, bag, shoes, car, coffee cup … therefore also objects lose their visible appearance. The external quality of things that are attractive to man kitsch if you want disappears. Visually they are reduced to pure plastic, leather, metal and scrap. They are no longer functional and enhance their useless dimension. From both objects and subjects Yomer is only interested in catching their inner appearance.
This own visual aesthetics of Yomer Montejo serves as a metaphor that problematizes without didacticisms on intrinsic and universal subject matters, such as cultural constructions, prostitution, identity, popular culture, the banal aspects of existence, fetish objects and religiosity. For example, Discurso is a piece that touches some of these issues through the use of dissimilar rhetorical. The image shows a scene in which an interview that causes an acute sense of estrangement who appreciates develops: the respondent is reduced to a gigantic and bloated face, a huge bone mass appears to be human, and threatening, is strives to minimize its partners. Synthetic and experimental way the artist makes a crude challenge to the discourses of power. He understands these as units capable of articulating the various texts, featured all its corrosive, manipulative nature. It seems that Yomer Montejo has that vocation of a searcher, to question the established, suspicious of the gods and their feelings. If it is so, he will find his way well.
