Carlos Garaicoa: Noticias Recientes

The Cuban Carlos Garaicoa (La Havana, 1967) is one of the most outstanding visual artists of his generation. He has developed, for some years now, a dialogue between art and urban spaces through which he investigates the social structure of our cities in terms of their architecture. By playing with sculptures, drawings, videos and photographs centred around irony and hopelessness, Garaicoa has found in his installations, for which he often uses a wide variety of materials, a way to criticise modernist Utopian architecture and the collapse of 20th century ideologies, by going deeper into the concept of the city as a symbolic space which appears in the works of authors such as José Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.

In the first part of the exhibition in Burgos now, as a sort of small retrospective, and since he has already shown in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Caribbean artist gathers some of the works that, taking La Havana as his own laboratory, inject thought provoking comments about subjects such as the failure of modernism as the catalyser for social change and the frustration and decadence of last century's Utopias.

The second part of the exhibition focuses on a series that the artist began in 2006 with the intervention on photographs showing neon signs and floors from La Havana, which are showed together with videos about this city. Using seven tapestries which accurately recreate—parts of the floor of the island's capital city, Garaicoa manipulates and brings out of context the trivial commercial messages that they originally presented: thus, the signatures of venerable firms in La Havana, "La Lucha" /The Fight), "El Volcán" (The Volcano) or "La Reina" (The Queen) become "La lucha es de todos" (The fight belongs to everyone) , "El volcán estallará, iluminados, esperamos"(The volcano will erupt, enlightened ones, Let us wait) or "Reina destruye o redime" (Queen, destroy or redeem), as in Haikus that bestows the urban landscape with a new and more critical social meaning.

Carlos Garaicoa
Noticias Recientes