Installation views
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Galerie Ron Mandos is proud to present The Permanent Journey: Dreams and Experiences of Ten Contemporary Cuban Artists, a group show curated by Cristina Vives, and co-curated by Lars Been.
Featured artists:
José A. Figueroa (1946), Yoan Capote (1977), Fernando Rodríguez Falcón (1970), Alejandro Campins (1981), Tomás Sánchez (1948), Jacqueline Maggi (1948), Marta María Pérez Bravo (1959), Linet Sánchez Gutiérrez (1989), René Francisco Rodríguez (1960), and Belkis Ayón (1967- 1999).
The painting by Tomás Sánchez is courtesy of Marlborough Gallery.
La sentencia by Belkis Ayón is part of the Collection Estudio Figueroa-Vives, Havana
Generally connected to the sole idea of migration, traveling has been a permanent topic in Cuban art and literature, and in the study of our identity. In its closest sense of physical displacement, or as action of embarking on a project, or even as metaphor of an escape from the present and construction of a future, traveling, under the present circumstances of the Cuban context, frequently means abandoning the island and not returning. Thus understood, the journey may appear as the circle of personal, economic, political or ideological conflicts. Always influenced by the ideology and politics, traveling has always been a frequent theme in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Cuban families scattered today in very diverse latitudes, and naturally, a topic of conflicts and radical rupture between generations of Cubans.
However, the journey is indeed more than that. It is a particular capacity of human beings to extend the borders of their minds and bodies. This is especially notorious when these human beings are artists. They can travel into themselves and exit, go back and forth from their specific geographies with the help of their imagination or spirit; and even if the trip never takes place, they are able to transmit to us that sense of freedom that is present in any attempted journey.
Thinking “the journey” is also undertaking it. It is an exercise of cognitive and spiritual preparation. A permanent learning about our immediate environment and about ourselves. It demands from us the reasons or pretended intentions we have to achieve it, and many times makes us reconsider the here and now of our lives. Nothing closer to undertaking a trip than to place ourselves in the depths of the space and time we have to live.
Conceived as four sections, the The Permanent Journey explores, without exhausting them, some of the concepts of journey that appear in the work of ten of the most outstanding contemporary Cuban artists. Each one of them traces possible roads to cover – in fact, they have covered them – and therefore the authenticity of the life experience they transmit.
The Permanent Journey asks the artists what a journey is, and the answers are in their works and lives.
