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PT MIRA ART FAIR, 2024
Juan Carlos Alom - Ariel Cabrera - Roberto Diago -
Diana Fonseca - Alex Hernández - Pablo Linsambarth
September 18 - 22, 2024
Booth: A5
Cultural identity in Latin America is tinged by the impact that multiple life stories have had on the collective imagination. Frequently, anonymity has been their main support; on more fortunate occasions they have reached the cause of the popular voice and have been transmitted from generation to generation as a faint whisper. However, contemporary art in the last two decades has become the resource through which to narrate, share, analyze, archive and eternalize these micro-stories.
The selection of works presented at MIRA ART FAIR, as a whole, affirm the validity of the personal portrait as a substitute for the collective portrait. Migration and cultural resistance are some of the recurring patterns in the works of Juan Carlos Alom, Ariel Cabrera, Roberto Diago, Diana Fonseca, Alex Hernández and Pablo Linsambarth. From positions that constantly seek self-definition, these artists invite us to reflect on the importance of decolonizing collective perceptions from a prism that embraces the human above the cultural.
Curiously, the narratives of these artists have a meeting point in the mystical, the folkloric and the festive. The images revisited by Alex Hernandez in his work Natural state and the ingenious meta paintings of Diana Fonseca, from her series Degradationinvite us to analyze from a cultural perspective what contemporary history conceptualizes as decadence. On the other hand, Roberto Diago's totemic beings, whose lives seem to run parallel to Ariel Cabrera's lustful characters, allow us to humanize some of the great social conflicts of our region. Finally, the postmodernist visions of Juan Carlos Alom and Pablo Linsambarth take us into the cosmos of contemporary Latin culture, full of strong contrasts.
Republic of Cuba, 2012
Silver on gelatin
35 x 35 cm (13.8 x 13.8 in)
P/A 3 (Edition of 3 + 3 P/A)
Juan Carlos Alom is one of the creators with the most outstanding trajectory in the fields of Cuban photography and documentary and experimental cinema. His work participates, together with that of other great artists, in the generational impulse of the nineties, determined to oxygenate the old
discursive and aesthetic presuppositions of the genre on the island. Alom's work gives an account of the habits, beliefs and affections of plebeian Cuba. Based on the spontaneity and expressive potential of the "domestic" portrait, he articulates a dry but forceful language to tell the story of the man of all times. The precariousness that runs through many of his pieces and the almost exclusive use of black and white, more than socioeconomic markers or aesthetic tools, function as metaphysical probing gestures about Cubans anchored in the post-history of the Cuban Revolution.
The Convention, 2024
From the series Tregua Fecunda
Oil on linen
162.5 x 162.5 cm (64 x 64 in)
In his works, Ariel Cabrera selects images taken from pre-established patrimonial documents in order to delve into rough areas and aspects little touched by Cuban and North American history, putting into dialogue with painting references related to the beginnings of photography and its forms. In addition, he proposes scenarios on military events of the struggles for independence, simultaneously creating events and supposed historiographic dialogues that subject history in general to scrutiny, where sarcasm, the erotic-burlesque and the playful are present, in romantic struggles and intimate scenes shaped as campaign notes and stories.
Woman, 2023
Bronze sculpture
47 x 60 x 22 cm (18.5 x 23.6 x 8.7 in)
Ed. 2 (Edition of 3)
Roberto Diago examines the condition of the Cuban Afro-descendant in the social territory of the Revolution. He has a cultural and sociological vision that fully understands the effects of colonial processes in the nations that suffered them. These traces are visible in the levels of marginalization and segregation, but also in the epistemic and linguistic ones. Diago denounces, exposes and develops exercises of cultural resistance that allow him to speak from a self-conscious and maroon otherness that claims other religious belongings, other canons of beauty and other views on the white world that inhabits the West.
Untitled, from the series Degradation, 2023
Painting fragments collected from the facades of buildings in Havana, on wood.
150 x 150 cm (59 x 59 in)
Diana Fonseca is an artist devoted to the dismantling, almost obsessive, of the simple things and everyday events that surround her. Perhaps because of this, or due to the lyrical propensity of her work, she captures varied images of reality and interconnects them from discourses that speak of contemporary life and its saturation.
of emptiness and banality, of the light and the endearing. From a position close to that of a film editor, Fonseca's work operates as a collage, a kind of palimpsestic mosaic where reality and fiction go hand in hand. For her, it is essential to question our perceptive mechanisms (why we see what we see) and the way in which discourses are elaborated.
around the real (why we say what we say). Based on these principles, Diana approaches, without fear, minimalist aesthetics, the notion of the unfinished, the manufacture and simplicity of visuals that emphasize gesturality as opposed to the forcefulness of totalizing narratives.
Diana Fonseca's Degradaciones are pieces structured from layers of paint from different Havana facades. This random superposition of the already solid remains of old layers of paint generates an abstract visuality that, nevertheless, gathers the history of the city, personal and collective stories, more or less anonymous, now rearticulated in an autonomous work. The title itself already points to the idea of the series: degradation, degradation in a temporal and physical sense -of deterioration, fading, oblivion-, and also, of course, in a more symbolic dimension.
Natural State, 2018-2024
Pattern design based on
archival image / Pigment ink printing on Hahnemühle William Turner 310 g/m2 cotton paper / Honeycombs of bees on a grid of
plastic, wood and natural wax / 83 x 63 cm (32.7 x 24.8 in.)
Estado Natural is an ongoing experiment for which the internal structure of several honeycombs of the Apis bee has been transformed. In them, the hexagonal wax cells are replaced by wefts whose geometries turn out to be taken from the forms that govern human action and intervention. A parallelism is thus established between elements designed by man and pre-existing natural structures. Its objective is to induce the bees in a constructive line different from their biological cycle, from the imposition of foreign and unnatural structures. With the collaboration of a group of beekeepers from the outskirts of the city of Havana, the colonies were moved from their original spaces to artificial honeycombs made of methacrylate and covered with wax. All of them present internal geometric grids of wide visual diversity, inspired by the conceptual interpretation of referents such as favelas, prisons, urban plots, polygraph, aircraft carriers, among others. In the first weeks, some results were obtained that could be shown. However, like any natural process, these experiences depend on a specific moment. Hence the intention to document the different phases and experiences through which it passes, as well as dexhibit their partial results and all this without violating its own temporal logic. In order to show the complexity of this research and given the processual characteristic that determines it, this installation will present several morphological levels.
Barge ride, 2024
Oil on canvas
170 x 160 x 4 cm (70 x 63 x 1.6 in)
Pablo Linsambarth is particularly interested in the confusing language that "political memory" generates when inserted in the dense wefts of contemporary culture. His work has as its starting point the recourse to different types of archives.
(images, literature, press, social networks), especially personal or family archives. During her childhood, her parents were linked to social movements against the Chilean military dictatorship, hence all the information derived from her early memory converges with that of her family and is integrated into the imaginaries she consumes today: her visual worlds, the music she listens to and the places she inhabits. This generates a deeply fragmented and enigmatic narrative that makes her work a very particular proposal. Linsambarth manipulates different media such as video, installation, painting, drawing and ceramic sculpture, but his way of narrating is essentially pictorial.
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