ART-PRESENTATION: Carlos Garaicoa-Unfaithful Images
Carlos Garaicoa is at the forefront of a number of contemporary Cuban artists who have taken architecture as their subject matter. Working in a range of mediums and formats (his diverse output includes photographs, three-dimensional models, pop-up books, videos, texts, and interventions) Garaicoa examines the urban environment and its embedded histories and ideologies. While his works have responded to various sites around the globe, his principal subject is his home city of Havana, with its many unfinished and crumbling buildings dating from before and, especially, after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galleria Continua Archive
Carlos Garaicoa’s solo exhibition “Unfaithful Images” is composed of a series of previously unseen works: “Vertical and Sogniamo sulla superficie graffiata di un vetro” (2021); “Ciudad Archivo / Archive City” (2020), a nucleus of recent sculptures in which the idea of the architecture of the city at night returns; “S/T (Bend Building)” a work in which Carlos Garaicoa plays with paper transforming it into sculpture. In the stalls area of the ex-cinema, the artist presents for the first time in Italy, “Partitura”, an installation developed over the last ten years thanks to a collaboration with seventy musicians and technicians. Conceived as a choral work, it’s the first interactive work by the Cuban artist. The reflection on urban and architectonic space has always been a way into more complex paradigms for Carlos Garaicoa, where present day history and the recent past is fragmented into signs, legacy and relationships. The artist says, “A few years ago, I visited the ruins of the ancient city of Armero and its landscape of houses buried in the mud that have given way to a nature full of spirits which ignores the sad history of the place. This visit to the city and its surroundings had a strong impact on me and it gave rise to a photographic series “De la serie Armero / From the Armero” series which pays homage to the more than 20.000 people that lost their lives in this tragedy”. Garaicoa’s artistic inspiration started with his curiosity for architecture, which was developed by peeking into architectural drawings he then went on to dismantle, chasing the tension to be found in the many human stories that have occurred over time, this and their immanent meanings also takes shape in the series “Ciudad Archivo / Archive City”. Here the buildings once again become the essential subjects of the dialogue between the individual and the urban environment, on each building there is a neon sign. “Once again”, explains Garaicoa, “I have tried to recreate processes of abstraction, poetry and fragility through the cities (…). The inclusion of writing, as well as some narratives that reflect social and existential tensions through the written sign of the city, has been recurring throughout my career. My drawings on paper, as impossible architectural proposals for Havana and other cities, have shown this obsession and this search for the integration of the text both in the urban sign and in the graphic sign”. An A3 sheet of paper, cut and folded, in Garacoa’s hands is transformed into a fragment of a city. This cycle of drawings from the title “S/T (Bend Building)” evokes some sculptural gestures from the first Russian avantgarde and some other visual proposals from Brazilian Neoconcretism; trying to appropriate itself within these forms, it creates a visual space that suggests both potential worlds and utopian ones. “Partitura”, represents another ring in this chain of urban travels. Carlos Garaicoa imagines a new type of orchestra with which he celebrates the potential of a unity created from diversity and the possibilities that come about from collaboration between cultures and genres: 40 street musicians, from different cultural backgrounds, abilities and musical traditions, interpret together the musical score composed by Estaban Puebla. The city borrows the sound of wind, string and percussion instruments and the voices of singers, to give us an archive of urban sounds within an unusual and unexpected visual space. “A game of gazes and listening, designed to be a space that changes randomly by offering different journeys and encounters within a city in constant transformation”, the artist comments.
Carlos Garaicoa was born in 1967 in Havana, Cuba. The artist studied thermodynamics before his mandatory military service, during which he worked as a draughtsman. Garaicoa then attended the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana from 1989 to 1994. Since the early 1990s, Garaicoa has employed photography, performance, drawing, sculpture, installation, text, and video to comment on architecture’s reflection of and effect on the political, economic, and cultural reality of cities. Although he references other international metropolises, much of his work critiques the architectural policies enacted in Havana following the 1959 revolution, which halted new projects and neglected older buildings in desperate need of preservation. In early works Garaicoa photographed his interventions into the urban environment, capturing the changes and subsequent human reactions. The photograph “Untitled (Decapitated Angel)” (1993) reveals a headless statue of an angel at the foot of what was once a grand banister but now sits abandoned within a dirt-coated hallway; the fall of this utopia is clearly attributed by bold letters stating “FIDEL” at the center of the photograph. Garaicoa later exhibited photographs of dilapidated buildings juxtaposed with his own drawings of the sites. In the drawn component of “About Those Untiring Atlantes that Sustain Our Present Day by Day” (1994–95), the artist replaces the photographed wooden supports struggling to hold up a Havana residence with a trio of muscular Atlantes performing the same function. As an artist in resident at Art in General in New York, Garaicoa created the series “When a Desire Resembles Nothing”, which offered up a comparison of Havana and New York City. In the mid-90s, Garaicoa began to incorporate additional mediums and installation techniques into his investigation of the urban landscape. He pessimistically interrogated the theme of a garden as a respite from urban life in the photographic series “Cuban Garden” (1996–2000) and in the multimedia installations “Japanese Garden” (1997) and “Garden” (1998). Garaicoa also created large complexes of architectural models between 1998 and 2002 using varied materials such as crystal home decor, Japanese lanterns, and lit candles. At Documenta 11 in 2002, Garaicoa presented a series of architectural models with corresponding black-and-white photographs; the optimism and potential implied by the bright, clean maquettes cruelly contrasted with the photographs revealing the actual dilapidated state of the sites themselves. In his recent work, Garaicoa has created diptychs juxtaposing a black-and-white photograph of a building with another in which that building has been extracted; in the latter, the artist implies the structure’s ghostly presence with a rendering of the building in string and pins.
Photo: Carlos Garaicoa, Soñamos en la superficie rayada de un cristal, 2021, mirrors and metal supports, variable dimensions, © Carlos Garaicoa, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Photo by: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio
Info: Galleria Continua, Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano, Italy, Duration: 24/7/2021-6/1/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sun 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00 by appointment only (book here), www.galleriacontinua.com
