Lorenzo Prieto and his questioning coexistences (+ audio, photos).

Aristóteles Coexistencias, the personal exhibition of visual artist Lorenzo Prieto García that opened on Tuesday at the Esteban Chartrand hall of the UNEAC headquarters in Matanzas, becomes a questioning look at the current Cuban reality.

Artistic beauty does not consist in representing a beautiful thing, but in the beautiful representation of a thing.» Immanuel Kant

«The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inner meaning.» Aristotle

Coexistences, the personal exhibition of visual artist Lorenzo Prieto Garcia that opened this Tuesday at the Esteban Chartrand hall of the UNEAC headquarters in Matanzas, becomes a questioning look at the current Cuban reality.

The young creator presents a critical and incisive visual discourse on today’s Cuba with a variety of techniques among which installation and painting predominate, from a daring, necessary and consistent interpretation, through eloquent images, with a visual force that begins with the material, the palpable to stay in the subjectivity, in the depths of the sensations and feelings found.

The result of the Juan Esnard creation grant from the UNEAC, in 14 pieces of medium-small format Lorenzo resorts, as usual in his work, to the use of unconventional materials (earth, masonry water, elements created by man to build), as well as to a monochromatic palette in which only red and black tones are combined, with which he succeeds very well in accentuating the essence of the exhibition.

Likewise, Coexistencias is enriched when it puts Prieto Garcia’s work -deserving of applause for its accelerated, growing and forceful evolution- in dialogue with that of two other young artists, also owners of interesting and singular ways of expressing themselves through art. The exhibition includes the pieces Ciudades paralelas (Parallel Cities) by Juan Arel Ruiz and El peso que más pesa (The heaviest weight) by Adrián Gómez Sancho.

From heartbreaking, disturbing images that sometimes border on the grotesque and manage to implode the fibers of every millimeter of the viewer’s body and stir their thoughts, the urban landscape and its degraded image becomes a metaphor to portray a broader context, the suffocating environment, if you will, that his works reflect, the undeniable losses of all kinds that surround us, that consume and suffocate us.

In the words of the show’s curator, art critic Yamila Gordillo in the words to the catalog, «Lorenzo does not present us with a pessimistic vision of reality, but rather a perspective of its current state, to appeal in this way to an avid conscience about the significance of safeguarding and preserving historical memory.»

Perhaps a less scrutinizing eye will notice only the material sense of the pieces, the deteriorated architecture, but whoever reads beyond what appears before his eyes will witness how the artist gives meaning to the value of art in its highest significance and uses it, through textures, lines, materials, concepts, to address a harsh, oppressive, tortuous context.

The also critic, painter and actor Moisés Rodríguez Cabrera values that «from his plastic proposal stand out his bold expressionist, neo-figurative designs, of laborious and impeccable workmanship in his concept of termination, in compositions preferably sculptured with a predominance of relief textures (or installations) in search of a greater dramatization of the image, of high visual impact and conceptual depth suggested, accentuated by the use of atmospheres and tonalities of dark plaintive colors».

Recurring in this exhibition, as in most of the artist’s work, is the appearance of the image of the island in the shape of an alligator.

It appears here with its entrails exposed, represented by organic matter (a piece entitled Crecida, which won first prize at the ACAA’s Riberas Salon) or the electric pole that resembles the cross of our heavy daily burdens, which won for the second consecutive time the prize at the UNEAC’s José Ramón Fundora Provincial Visual Arts Salon.

Coexistences, Lorenzo Prieto’s exhibition, winner of the Juan Esnard scholarship of the UNEAC in Matanzas, is nothing more than the reaffirmation that, as the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky said, «each work of art is the daughter of its time and, often, the mother of our feelings».

Written by Jessica Mesa