Cuba Iluminada at Antiqvarivm Gallery

NEWSJIBARO PHOTOS

26 Oct

The Cuba Iluminada exhibition, which will open next day 5 at the Antiqvarivm Gallery, in Seville, brings together 100 photographs of the Project and a video where the photographed themselves narrate, from their particular point of view, how the photographic sessions were developed. Among those photographed in this selection are musicians such as Chucho Valdés, Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés; among the writers, Leonardo Padura, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez or Carilda Oliver; among the dancers Alicia Alonso, Carlos Acosta or Viengsay Valdés; among painters, Fabelo, Sosabravo or Rancaño; and among the athletes, Javier Sotomayor, Félix Savón or Ana Fidelia Quirot. In short, a whole universe of essential faces to understand all the depth and uniqueness of the art and culture of a country so close, despite the distance, as Cuba.

Venue and Dates

Antiquarium Sevilla
Plaza de la Encarnación, 37
Sevilla, España

November 5 - November 27, 2020

Cuba Iluminada - About the exhibition

During the last ten years, the Huelva photographer Héctor Garrido has portrayed more than 250 fundamental people of Cuban art and culture. They are the enlightened people of a country that has made culture and art one of its hallmarks. Cuba Iluminada is a first-person tour of the faces that hide the passions and tears that are reflected in the paintings, books, music and cinema of today's Cuba.

The Cuba Iluminada exhibition arrives in Seville after a long itinerary that has led it to visit, among other cities, Havana, Madrid, Huelva, Bilbao and most of the provincial capitals of Cuba. During that trip, the author wanted to strip the exhibition of all the superfluous and heavy elements that showed it as a finished and closed work. Thus, to vindicate its unfinished character, its “work in progress” soul, from its exhibition in Madrid, it decided to eliminate the framing, the glass and the mat and leave the photographs free of all adornment, as they appear at the time. having been conceived. And this is how the exhibition now lands in Seville, at the Antiqvuarivm Gallery, where it will remain from November 5 to 27, 2020.

Cuba Iluminada is also a catalog book, published by Editorial Rueda (Madrid), where the portraits made in the first seven years of the project are collected. Since then, Héctor Garrido has continued to create those “portraits with views of the interior”, as he likes to call them. Cuba Iluminada, in the words of Héctor Garrido “is one of the projects that has influenced me the most, perhaps because looking inside the people who posed for me, I have ended up stirring, completely disorganizing my own interior”. As a result of these years of project, Garrido ended up picking up his luggage to move to live in Havana, where he has resided permanently for the last few years. He left behind him more than a quarter of a century in Doñana, dedicated to photography and nature and living, like a modern Robinson, within the Doñana Biological Reserve, in the isolated house of Martinazo: isolated from disturbances and The speed of the meaningless world we live in Martinazo was more than a home. For me it represents intimate growth, my maturity as a person and my openness as an artist. After 25 years, the day I closed the door of the place where I have lived the longest, I felt - not without pain - that I had closed a necessary cycle and that I was beginning a path in which, since then, I would tread differently. As it has really been since then."

Héctor Garrido's photographs became well known from his collaboration in Alberto Rodríguez's film “La Isla Minimima” (2014) where they created a magical atmosphere under the opening credits of the narrative. They were part of another of Héctor Garrido's great works: aerial photography. For almost thirty years he has been flying in the company of his friend and pilot Hans Nerlinger the most unique landscapes to turn them into an alphabet about the grammar with which nature is expressed. The search has been the use of geometry as a language and, more specifically, fractal geometry: a pillar to understand his entire trajectory. Four of his photography books are dedicated to this form of expression, which for Garrido is “the language with which nature expresses itself, the grammar with which everything that is not of artificial origin is built. That is why visually the leaf of a tree and a gully dug by the rain, our neural system and the roots of a tree are so similar.”