Transparencies
Oil on canvas
150 x 90 cm
The work GOOGLE, from the series TRANSPARENCIAS, 2020. It becomes a metaphor of what social networks and virtual reality represent for man in the face of the contingency experienced as a result of Covid-19. How we were forced and conditioned to use these means of communication as a lifeline, both as artists to show their work and as viewers to keep up to date with the new prerogatives that this situation has brought to art in general. On the other hand, the Google logo made with the most identifying architectural structure of Havana, the Malecón, gives the work a unique meaning. The boardwalk is the limit of the city and at the same time the limit of free knowledge, seen from the point of view of practical and objective reality. Beyond that wall, the eyes and human commensurability do not reach the power to conquer the space that it delimits. Therefore, the meaning of the piece itself lies in the possibility offered by technology and interconnection for the human being. Google, the Internet, digital platforms and all online art galleries and circuits offer creators and the public the possibility of staying psychotechnologically connected and immediate to any event, despite being geopolitically in a single place, alluding to the same concept of the icon of the boardwalk in the shape of a giant fish tank, where it allows you to live, fly, dream, and allows your sight and mind to pass, but not the body. The Malecón welcomes everyone: the distracted walker, the fisherman, the child playing between the legs of a grandmother who seeks in the transparency of the sea the presence of what she has lost, the one who dreams of a path above the waters, the one who flee the imminent collapse of the city and many who seem to be waiting for something. Real space is not the object of representation but the site where an illusory universe is woven, a universe fed by the anxieties and dreams of thousands of people. From these shared obsessions a parallel world emerges; virtue lies in the will to bring that world into reality. The distance between real object and imaginary object seems to cancel out; in which everything is realeverything exists in the imagination of Cubans. What did Lezama call it? The longings and frustrations of the islanders who allow themselves a moment to sit on the wall to try to console themselves with the imagination of the outside or the wishes of the tourist who tries to conjecture what he will find inside? The cursed or the blessed circumstance of water everywhere? Of course, there is no satisfactory answer: the process of intellection of that space is an extremely bookish process. It is interesting here to put the accent not so much on the myth but, precisely, on the process of mythification. So he participates in a mystifying practice, instrumentalized from the need to respond to an ideology. That is why this vision of the boardwalk can coincide with the contemplation of a fish tank, where the vision is clear, direct, isolated in its singularity, it does not accept misunderstandings; That is why the wall becomes a letter, a word and renounces being only a passive element, conducive to contemplation. The project accommodates itself in the capacity of art to transmute its own object, or rather, it reproduces the paradox of an attempt at figuration that wants to couple itself to its object, disfiguring it. This is how a discovery is actually taking shape.