Whirlwind of Colors / Miguel Iturria Savón / Miguel Iturria Savón

According Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda, curator of Whirlwind II, exhibited from 9 May to 9 June in Havana Gallery, “it is in order that that object that hasn’t told a story before,” a maxim contradicted by the young artists who presented The Whirlwind in the capital last fall, a continuation of the show in the Antonio M. Claret Cultural Center in Santiago de Cuba, where the logic promotional showed an emerging group that looks at nature and reality from the expressions of art.

Whirlwind II brings many “intellectual games, transporting and interchanging, representatives of one or another direction,” as a “spaces of friction between one artist and another, a work with another and the possibilities of interaction” between architects, although each production has its own standards and individual poetry that integrates the whole and “embraces a kind of epochal sensitivity and different ways to build their imagination.”

The whirlwind of the Havana Gallery becomes the pretext that “rising in the middle of chaos, is the possibility of a subsequent order,” as “dispersed particles, riots, which then settle into a new and different structure.” It includes novels, from known thirty-somethings in the provinces and temporal intermedia whose methodological diversity defies “sectarian logic” between painting, video, new technologies and the post conceptual, indicator of a claim of advocacy and partnership.

Everything fits into this mapping or visual imagery, except the possibility of classifying it. They are works that bring intensity and technical deployment of original art scenes, and poetic, philosophical and human sensitivity, marked by the social dynamics of creation, far from extreme positions around the “autonomy of the aesthetic” or “the re-politicalization of art.”

As “only art can accept disorder without reservation,” counterpoint artists converge in Whirlwind II such as: Pavel Acosta (Camagüey, 1975); Yunior Acosta (Villa Clara, 1978); Nadal Antelmo (Cárdenas, 1968); Kevin Beovides (Havana , 1978), Carlos Caballero (Camagüey, 1978), Alejandro Campins (Manzanillo, 1981), Susan P. Dalahanate (Havana, 1984), Lisandra I. Garcia (Havana, 1989), Marianela Orozco (Sancti Spiritus, 1973), Levi Orta (Havana, 1978), Michel Perez Chicken (Manzanillo, 1981), Harold Adislen Reyes and Vazquez, both born in 1984 in Havana.

Pavel Acosta presents photos of the Stolen Talent and Stolen Spaces series in which a sense of time and history is condensed that seems to translate into film and video, which alters or disrupts the caught identity. He also uses the photography of Harold Vazquez, whose analytical and deconstructive structure proceeds through the image as a document recreated with slogans in the X-Places series and “Jeló mai frén,” printed digitally. Photo printing tied to the acrylic is centered in the offerings of Lisandra I. Garcia, a friend of the portrait as a pretext of artistic reflection in Seven Days, where she infers moderation and balance.

Yunior Acosta highlights concerns about the ecological as an essential element of human subsistence. His caustic look at our natural condition nests in Good Luck (gypsum, rabbit’s foot and bird feathers), Finding Heights (taxidermy and bones of birds) and the woodcut Horse Frolicking in the Meadow.

Video and audiovisual configure the offerings of Susana P. Dalahanate, able to philosophize about the rituals of life, significant in the metaphorical Untitled (28 minutes), where someone takes earth from a bed with a shovel. Chela, by Lisandra Garcia; Self-management and Time Off from the Spaniard Orta Levi Nuria Güell; and even more the memorable Directed Dream of Marianela Orozco, who ventures into the everyday through video. Orozco surprises with Accession, digital printing and poetic construction.

Nadal Antelmo and Kevin Beovides start from new technologies. The first with Networks (2007-2010). Word in Progress, a photographic installation for space and for the web. The second offers Greek, digital storytelling, or cyber-literature; landscape Zen and Deadhead, the three from 2008.

Philosophical concerns and aesthetic pleasure are found in the offerings of Carlos Caballero, creator of the paintings On the Other Side of the Meadow, and Untitled (Ray); Alejandro Campins, author of The Son, Keep Out and Suo Chang Mountain (oil-canvas from 2010 and 2011); Michel Perez Pollo, whose paradoxical and animist look in The Shore of the Beach and Model for the Shore of the Beach. While Reyes Adislen offers scenes of childhood as a boundary between the naive and the twisted, given in the series League, made with acrylic, tempera and collage on cardboard.

May 27 2011