Postures
Thesis Project. San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts.
Intervention at the Imago Gallery. Gran Teatro de La Habana, Cuba. Installation and objects made of bisque clay, plaster, textiles and various materials. By: Yeny Casanueva
1999-2000
About POSTURES
Thesis. San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts.
By: Yeny Casanueva
Thesis. San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts.
By: Yeny Casanueva
Although the body is also a bit of the soul,
there is a tendency to think that the first contains the second.
Francisco Umbral
there is a tendency to think that the first contains the second.
Francisco Umbral
This project discusses the impact of culture on the spiritual nature of the body. It was carried out during the second decade of the 90s in Havana, Cuba.
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I found myself in a cultural environment that was trying to turn definitively towards the production of museum-worthy works to the detriment of the ephemeral, the development of small formats instead of large installations, introspection and individualism rather than collective work, and aesthetic hedonism rather than “the prosaic”, in a kind of “restoration of certain aesthetic paradigms” that had been broken by the social art of the 1980s.
I was under the influence of the so-called “return to the craft”, a trend guided by the country’s cultural institutions as a solution to the massive exodus of Cuban artists abroad, which had resulted in a lack of cultural representation of government policies; (…) a context that promoted the production of objects, and where the level of formal elaboration became an indicator that emphasized the intention to support and be part of the system, favoring the tendency towards formalism and commitment to certain market criteria, the return to the idea of art as an aesthetically pleasing object, etc.
Starting from my individual reality and taking into account that art, as well as culture, although by different paths, are directed to reality and to the means by which reality comes to be perceived, although art allows for discoveries to be made within a spontaneous thought that proposes new dimensions in relation to reality, I oriented these works in the form of conceptual exercises, in which I explored the contextual margins of that reality, and in which the process was as important as the objectual part that remained as a result.
I began to work with procedural materials leaving them as definitive material. In other words, materials that were usually used as a means to achieve a result with other materials, such as plaster, raw or baked clay, different textiles, or even elements of my own body such as hair and nails, which ended up becoming part of the works.
I did not have a specific theme but I was interested in the influence of fashion, religion, and the material austerity promoted by the aesthetics of the Cuban revolution, no longer from the direct use of symbols addressed to exhaustion by political advertising, but from what Duchamp called "infraleve", that is, from the subtle, almost unnoticed sensation of the finishes, of the atmosphere that was lived and breathed at that time at a popular level, and how those sensations were reflected aesthetically, spontaneously, as a response to certain prejudices, or to the search or need to satisfy certain desires.
In this sense, I identified with certain materials, such as plaster and clay, latex, which allowed me to make molds of my own body. They were rather rough materials in their finishes but nevertheless very practical for capturing and reproducing realistic textures.
I made these molds of my body at first with the aim of casting certain fragments in clay or directly in lead or blown glass, but during the work process, they became increasingly important as definitive materials, as for example in the installation 100 times my mouth closed, made up of 100 molds of my mouth that I arranged on the wall.
They were materials that I used to separate, isolate or establish borders that showed the physical space of the body or the visual limits of a concept, (for example: the mouth associated with language, communication, expression, etc., and in the same way other pieces were emerging); which became the first part of the process. Then point out relationships between the objectified body, associated with objects of everyday life, or with certain aesthetic concepts, underlined with the titles...
The fact that I was representing the body with these rough materials, with realistic textures but without any care in the final finish, made me think about the sensation of the spaces they occupied, the similarity between the walls painted with quicklime and the plaster I used to take moulds, the walls without finishing or with a rustic, austere finish, typical of popular solutions..., and the body as a result of a permeable relationship with that aesthetic, with those forms of culture, conceptually nourished by the taste and customs of that context, something that transcended the physical condition and also became part of the spiritual projection.
Each object in this series represents a double reflection based on a double noun, the way in which the elements interacted was the verb, or the gestural nature of thought, and the result, a cultural questioning.
Each work was not only the object and its title, but the result of a process, similar to a ritual, and represented or evidenced reflections linked to my personal experience, but also to forms of my thinking as an individual in convergence with social consciousness.
In short, the first metaphor in these works is the body as a synonym for the personal point of view, the first sieve of cultural reality, which is the point of view, and which is mediated by experience and particular sensitivity. The first thing was to fragment the body and define conventions that transfigure it in its adaptation to the context. Elements on which I have always been interested in reflecting. The second metaphor consisted of establishing a contrast between the visual statement and the title, emphasizing the simultaneous influence of the image and the words, also of the objectified body… The work process resulted in a trance between many possibilities and alternatives that synthesize the contrast of a series of concepts until finding the middle point between form and concept, where the ideas were neither entirely precise nor entirely indefinite, to give rise to the reflection of the spectator.
The works as a result are ephemeral certainties, as ephemeral as the body with which one acts on the world.
Postures
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Postures
Thesis project
San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts
Thesis project
San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts