escape
2019
woodcut produced during the residency / expedition
" interconnections or + art in dialogue" in La Havana, Cuba.
Project organized and idealized by Fabricio Reiner de Andrade, Luiz Armando Bagolin and Andrés Inocente Martín Hernández .
2019
woodcut produced during the residency / expedition
" interconnections or + art in dialogue" in La Havana, Cuba.
Project organized and idealized by Fabricio Reiner de Andrade, Luiz Armando Bagolin and Andrés Inocente Martín Hernández .
Fuga
I have been following Edu Silva’s artistic production for a while, and as a part of this process, I have included him in the Residence/Expedition that, during March and April of 2019, landed in Cuba for the 13th Habana Biennial, in order to deepen his research and face the challenges before a new cultural and social reality.
The central activity of the project took place in the Taller Experimental de Gravado de La Habana, a national and international reference in printmaking (except for screen-printing).
One of the goal for the residence was precisely the contact with Habana’s reality and the possible connections between the artists and Cuban history.
Edu Silva built, for the first time, visual manifestos in printmaking, lithograph and woodcut. “La cost está preta” and “Fuga” emerged as the result of this immersion.
In “Fuga", the artist suggests a range of interpretations of a local and global reality. The small row is a symbolic element that acknowledges a specific local reality, which can be metaphorically associated with a solution that writer Virgílio Piñera mentioned as the damned circumstance of water on all sides and which cuban artists – especially those from the 1990s generation, linked to political and economic changes – patented in their artworks: Tonel, Sandra Ramos, Kcho, Los Carpinteiros...
Thus, Silva removed the chromatic content from the row, placing it in a red mass, suggesting interpretations with a powerful symbolic charge that surpasses, even accentuates, the geographic contours of Cuban reality. To see in Brazil the red and the movement of the row!
At the same time, the composition weight of the three central elements of the artwork evoke the wearing out of the two-dimensional precariousness of the image, strengthen the dilution of formal elements and the interpretative qualities of the ensemble: the shapeless row corroded by the compact red mass struggles in diluting the rigidity of a outlined white medium, suggesting a nearly theatrical representation. The damaged row can elicit another edge of reality, one of insistence and desire of impermanence.
Consequently, Silva transcends, with his project, the literality of a reality to articulate concept, time and space for and in the contemporary display.
Doutor Andrés I. M. Hernández, 2019