Carlos Garaicoa: Witness, the Roots of the World

Galleria Continua presents Testigos, Las Raìces del Mundo [Witness, The Roots of the World], a new solo exhibition by one of the protagonists of the international art scene, Carlos Garaicoa.

Since the 1990s Carlos Caraicoa has contributed to defining evolutions in contemporary language, focusing on architecture and the city. Using a range of different media, the artist has explored the city as living organism. Garaicoa’s work has played a key role in the development of the Cuban art scene, and he remains a point of reference for the new generations.

This solo show brings together three new series of works, which the artist has realized specially for the exhibition. Two of them, Testigos / Witness and Las raíces del mundo / The Roots of the World, lend their name to the project.

Witness comprises a series of drawings in which Garaicoa returns to the slow work of chiselling, creating small-scale wooden models. To express the gesture and the material volumes, the artist employs the old technique of graphite frottage, rendering it in a current idiom. The result are lyrical landscapes that offset the geometric figures with the abstraction of the composition and where the play of lines seems to casually encounter the visual weft of the drawing. Architecture, text and graphic language persist in this new series as central elements of the artist’s poetics.

“The Roots of the World is an installation that expresses the tension between construction/destruction as phases in a race for renewal and epistemological change intrinsic to the historic process,” says Garaicoa. The work is an invitation to dwell on the dynamic of the opposites and the extent to which it has influenced the structuring of society.

Rotting wooden beams, pitted by time and voracious insects, fragments and ruins of a house worn down by the weight of history – this is the installation that rounds off Garaicoa’s exhibition project. A metaphor of the perennial cycle of construction and destruction, this work prompts reflection on the precarious balance of the society-architecture-sustainability equation.