_Havana: Enigma of the Ruins_, by the Cuban American Guillermo Portieles at Fototeca de Cuba
Havana: Enigma Of The Ruins , curated by Dennys Matos, art critic and independent curator, consists of 12 photographic works intervened with mixed media such as charcoal, watercolor, acrylic and other. In addition to these works, the exhibition includes a video art titled Enigma Havana.
In this art show Guillermo Portieles proposes a key poetic reinterpretation of the ruins of the Caribbean Capital centenarians. A project where the author, taking expressive tools of aesthetics and artistic conceptualism Land Art movement, documenting dilapidated buildings, located in the central perimeter of the city of Havana.
For George Simmel "Architecture is the only art that settles with authentic peace, the grand contest between the will of the spirit and the necessities of nature, in which are resolved in an exact equilibrium, the adjustment of accounts between the soul which tends to the above and the gravity which pulls towards the below". In this being, architecture then represents the challenge of man towards nature and it is as if she were daring man amid the ruins. For Portieles, this implicates more of the re-weighing the cultural (tropos) of the ruin, from the relation between the elements of the material history of man. That is to say, think of it from a species of poetic dialog and (a duel) between nature and architecture, as the material history of civilization.
Havana: Enigma of the Ruins underscores how the ruins are the result of a composite of natural forces that define the historic period of man over nature, his habitat, transforming the present into the past, into vestiges of dwellings and lifestyles, into memory of human remains. As a result of this aesthetic reflection, apart from their history, the ruins acquire an artistic “charm,” since they bestow a natural touch to the works of man.
Havana: Enigma of the Ruins was shown earlier in Collage Gallery in Coral Gables Florida in January 2013. It is an itinerant project after its opening in the FOTOTECA OF CUBA, is scheduled to be exhibited at the Frost Art in Brooklyn NY Space by the end of 2013.
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