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Galería La Caja Negra
Carlos Garaicoa. Frases
Carlos Garaicoa. Frases
Carlos Garaicoa, Frases, 2009
Ten original photographs by Carlos Garaicoa printed on 285 gr JPP Mould Made paper and embossing.
Each one is mounted in an individual passepartout and presented in a wooden box covered in cloth and embossed.
55 x 46 cm each
Edition 15
The artist has captured all the images in Havana where many buildings from the 50’s and 60’s have texts engraved in their floors or walls. These buildings –old shops and office buildings-‐ are no longer in use and the signs that identified them have deteriorated over time. In an exercise of imaginary re-‐ construction of these ruins, Garaicoa reorganizes the texts as part of longer sentences that convey political or poetical thoughts. The added words are embossed on the photograph so they can barely be seen. They appear and disappear, much like the buildings and the social, cultural and political life they once were part of.
Image Credit:
Carlos Garicoa
Born in 1967 in Havana, Cuba.
Lives and works in Madrid, Spain and Havana, Cuba.
Carlos Garaicoa’s work is characterized by an informed engagement with the genius loci of contemporary cities as manifested in their architecture and infrastructure (and in particular with his native Havana) to which Garaicoa brings a sharply critical yet restlessly inventive artistic vision.
Garaicoa works in and across various mediums and disciplines — sculpture, photography, drawing, installation, architecture, urbanism and text-based work — yet always maintains an exquisite execution and a meticulous aesthetic in his finished works. While his Cuban heritage serves as a point of departure, the full scope of Garaicoa’s artistic practice extends to a broader range of subject matter, including 20th century utopianism, classic modernist forms and ideals, the infrastructures of centralized state planning, the vestiges of colonial architecture and urbanism, and the current-day shifting political and economic terrain of post-colonial globalism.
Central to Garaicoa’s broad-reaching artistic program is an examination of structures — especially and most visibly the structures that make up our built environment, but also, on a conceptual level, the web of linguistic, political, social and artistic structures on which society itself is ‘constructed.’ Tracing the sites — literal as well as metaphorical and temporal — where these structures overlap or diverge, Garaicoa manages to invoke poetry as well as critique and to suggest intimacy as well as provocation.
