Chaos and order
By: Larry J. Gonzáles
Visual artist

The notion of the exhibition space as a single whole could be the first call to attention regarding Intermediate Pieces by the artist Yeny Casanueva (Galería El Guerrero, Havana). This time, Yeny's work is configured based on possible dialogues that can be established between her objects and the space that supports them.

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The artist wallpapers the walls and part of the ceiling of the gallery, transmuting the spatial variant into the surroundings of a supposed model. Making use of all the possibilities offered by the gallery environment - including several modules of the gallery itself that could be used as the possible location of sculptures or some kind of installation - allows the journey through Intermediate Pieces to go beyond the total sense when it comes to using the space. The notion of totality is also established on concepts specific to the artist's work.

Turning the wallpapered walls into supports for documentation of previous pieces or for objects that are reused in each recreation of a new and chaotic environment by the artist, makes one think of the work as a sketch or a kind of journey through what has been exhibited so far; a way of integrating photos as intermediate pieces or objects that have been left halfway between what was never exhibited outside the ISA workshops and the new charge that is now given to them by reusing them. Yeny has used these objects as a kind of raw material, from which she manages to annul the primary meaning that they had as a finished work: the glass casts of childhood toys, molds of a sculpture that she collected from the ISA corridors and that in texture could dialogue with the skeleton of a crocodile head that hangs from the wall, the plaster cast of a flower that absorbs wine from a container, and in turn the relationship between the wine and the trail of red paper that emerges from the ceiling to suggest the multiplicity of space. Also a light beyond the ceiling.

Even when Yeny's environments are traversed up to a certain point, there is always the feeling of continuity, the idea that the piece can continue to be generated by the magnetization of other possible objects (the piece from the exhibition Elemental Watson (Ni muy Lobo ni muy Caperucta) at Galería L or her graduation thesis from the ISA exhibited in the Salón Blanco of San Francisco de Asís).

Although these works are far from being conceived under the essence of work-in-progress: where the meaning of a certain idea is based on the continuous and "infinite" process of a work that extends over time, one feels that the process for the artist is as vital as the concluded notion of her pieces. The process understood as a way of re-functionalizing objects or the documented visions of other exhibitions that are oxygenated on the basis of a new discourse.

This time, Yeny's work has been closer to an apparent order than to the possible chaos that links the visuality of her large installations. Even when the artist conceives models and has a predetermined order for what seems to be exhibited by random nature, in the end she imposes chaos as a result.

This time, the unification of space through the atmosphere she creates with the drawings on paper and the relationship between the documentation and the objects, make the gallery become an "ordered" way of thinking about her intermediate pieces. Ways of dialoguing from art with the work itself. Then, carrying her objects to the studio. Until chaos possibly breaks out again.

Intermediate pieces
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