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Carlos Garaicoa is born and becomes an artist in Havana, his
work matures through the density of the years that marked
“the end of utopias”, in a tattered city of ruins,
also profound and prompting, that the artist turns into a
fundamental stone for his projects of critical architecture,
which extend to the present day through his wandering around
the world. Some of the oeuvres in this exhibition are part
of a “body of work” that reveals his direct and
prime relation with the urban-human context that operates
as an anchor. Other works are the result of a natural process
of universalizing his oeuvre, which is not reduced to evoking
utopias; it is extended to an archaeology of the present in
search for the human traces in its living space, wherever
it calls for the artist’s attention.
This is an exhibition that is possible, for a broad and multiple
public, it is not a rigorous or ideal anthology, nor a group
of unpublished works that have been recently produced, but
it has both intentions: there are fundamental works that allow
for a reading of phases, subjects and resources, and they
offer a clear view of the artist’s work, of his conceptual
coherence and his creative methods. Change, experimentation
and always finding diverse paths are some of the most captivating
aspects of his work and one of the reasons for this exhibition.
Beyond the unquestionable lyricism of his works, of the literary
intentions of titles and writings, of the treated subjects
or employed media, the existence of a knowledgeable effective
value calls to our attention in Carlos Garaicoa´s works.
It is translated into the way that the artist makes available
a method of knowledge and interaction through reality, expressed
in such multiple and heterodox ways as his objects of attention.
The viewer seems prompted to appropriate that methodology
and to depart with a hidden lens in search for urban landscapes
he can modify.
Upon a first glance, the works by Garaicoa reveal the associations
made by the artist between the references taken from reality
and the result of transformative interventions in that social
context. In deeper breeds of significance, we find the remaining
concepts that give foundation to the work and a critical attitude
as an unavoidable exercise. The word is, likewise, an indivisible
and definitive element: the titles for each work are essential
guides for their comprehension. Architecture reveals as another
instrument to discuss the relations of man with his vital
context. In the social interstice created by art as a space
of subversion among social rules, Carlos´ work is presented
as an inquiring review of modern utopias incarnated in the
urban space.
Carlos Garaicoa inscribes himself as an individual artist
in a contemporary art circuit defined by market cannons, but
his work is the result of a collective effort, of a project
involving different creators (artisans, designers, architects)
in the execution of his ideas. In consonance with practices
that are common to conceptual art, within the living and dynamic
process that is still recognized as art, there is a seed that
tends to the misalignment of the creative exercise and to
the expression of the multiple talents that human beings as
individuals for creation may have. That broad comprehension
of the art craft liberates the artist of the bindings in the
division of work set into the artistic process itself which
historically reduced its area of action to a controllable
refinement of aesthetics. Carlos is, to a satisfactory measure,
an artisan, an architect, an engineer, a photographer, a chronicle
writer, a producer, a master and an apprentice, and as many
labels as are necessary be assumed, in an organic way, for
what is important here is the transformative idea and the
execution of the project.
Ania Rodríguez and Rodolfo de Athayde
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Click on images
to enlarge
From the Series "New Architectures"
2003
Installation with wire
and rice paper lamps.
On how my Brazilian library feeds from fragments
of a concrete reality. Books, concrete, bullet shots.
"Noticias Recientes (Brazil)" 2008
Diptych. B/W
photographs mounted and
laminated on plexiglas
155 x 125 cm each
Bullet impacts
“Japanese garden” 1997
Installation: Stones, word, japanese doors,
text in vynil and color photographs
(80 x 100 cm)
“Quixote” 1996-2006
color Photograph mounted and laminated
in plexiglas.
Vynil drawing.
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