Paisajes de trabajo: Galeria Luisa Strina

Garaicoa shows sculptures, drawings and installations specially produced for the solo show at Galeria Luisa Strina, focusing on modernist architecture and the paradoxes between the beauty of the utopian urban landscape and the efforts and manual labor involved in its construction (both historically and daily – in the artist’s own process of creation).

The exhibition is composed of 4 “work tables” in which the artist painted enlarged Oscar Niemeyer blueprints; these works are titled Power, Justice, Dance and Death. Around this set, the artist installs drawings of wires connected by nails and old rulers, directly on the wall. These also allude to the modernist architecture and the ideals of this unfinished civilizational project, especially in Latin America.

New works from the Puzzles series, which began in 2018, complete the exhibition, in which photographs of Cuba’s urban landscape are enlarged on pieces of puzzles in bluish tones. In part of the surface of the jigsaw puzzle photography where the architecture is ruined, the artist disassembles the puzzle, leaving in what remains of the “original” landscape; under the collapse of the small pieces, a black and white image of the same places is visible, installed as a second layer, in the background, depicting the urban ruin.