As a sort of inaccurate and random detail, xl’2 exhibition seems to discover a phenomenon with implications that go beyond the artistic world, as it should be… An anomaly that has been settled within social processes, hatching in the human realm. The new informational records and the implementation of various communication channels become symbols of a new militancy which seems to drag us all and that’s the topic dealt by the inaugural exhibition of the 6th Contemporary Cuban Art Salon, which was inaugurated on September 12 at the Center for the Development of Visual Arts and the Photographic Library of Cuba with an extensive list of forty-one artists belonging to several generations.
According to Cristina Figueroa Vives, one of the curators of the exhibition: Our intention is to reflect the concerns of the youngest contemporary artists, seen from the information and communication systems, from the art, by the art, through the art (…) the concept of information, distribution channels, the way in which the information gets to the artists and how the art translates it, it is one of the strongest phenomena that is happening now. None of us is free of the penetration of technology, is free of the penetration of social networks. And the way we dialogue with this, with this entire infrastructure, also affects art.1 Undoubtedly, captivating attention toward situations that compared to other spaces of the world keep us all the time in an off-line state might be the most attractive nuance of the proposal in question. How to deal with the expressive and expansive possibilities of the internet in a country where the broadband stands as a chimera? Well, through the emergence that identifies us, the one that led us to reinvent ourselves, to share the philosophy of one of the greatest architects when he stated that: less is more.
The design and concretion of a set of curatorial ideas, focused on interactive communication in the cognitive process of recognizing and incorporating information to the dialectic of a kind of thinking that is constantly updated, which does not escape to the advance of technologies that came to our context through dubious reliability ways -most of the time- were items that were treated to condense. The pluralities of manifestations with which the sample tried to denote the processes that take place “on the left” in our country, concepts that are rethought and are conditional on the maelstrom of the days, favored the coexistence of poetic thinks looking from and towards the most current Cuban art, from research and vocations that resize the phenomenon known at global and regional scale.
To blow up the context it is worth noting the critical and urgent exercise, fostered by the pieces as a whole, although it is difficult to recognize the legitimacy of approaches, perhaps due to the very essence of the contaminated information that has been used. Parables, metonymy, synecdoche … well, tropes that exerted a strong impact on the conception of a context which plays with search codes that are generated by multiple channels. Broadly, xl´2 delves into otherness, the emergent and alternative issue, and the notions that inspire the artists. It is itself a procedural gesture, unfinished, a paraphrase that deconstructs axioms and reveres the new field that baptizes contemporary art. It is a neutral zone where anything goes, a haziness imposed as a methodology, something to decode characters….
1 Interview granted to Art OnCuba Magazine by Cristina Figueroa Vives, invited to the 6th Contemporary Cuban Art Salon and one of the curators of xl’2 exhibition. (September 10, 2014, CDAV)
