NUEVA CITY: CREATING A CITY
A “new” New York emerges inside “Benito Ortiz Borrell” Art Gallery in Trinidad city, after crossing an almost impassable spatial and cultural frontier and making its way up to this small city in the center of Cuba by the hand of artist Alejandro López.
At this singular exhibition, the artist has transmuted a potential of meanings born from an intimate need for generosity and the wish to share his vital experiences with the audience.
Through a maze of drawings, pictures, installations, and canvases, Alejandro creates a personal set design for an iconoclastic production where the elements chosen, either by spiritual affinity or by its own importance as cultural images, are the main actors of its plot. An unprejudiced puzzle where each piece fits or connects itself with the next one in a playful game of quotes and references, and a continuous exchange of rhythms, colors, and signals, shapes a recognizable skyline of high buildings that reflect each other, among countless billboards, key works of contemporary art and populous streets where beings and signs of a totally cosmopolitan universe walk on. This is a complete immersion in the art and architecture of a city of whirls and lights, of dark gray and bright orange tones, an island and a continent at the same time.
Nueva City is not confined to show social realities, or cultural or political stereotypes, but points to a realm that is ever emerging, that sprouts up from the unexpected chance encounter at the turn of any corner of this great city.
The artist turns the audience in forced pedestrians of an ecstatic city, squashed together inside the narrow halls of the gallery. The use of provocative materials and forms on shaping the pieces, the deliberate guidance of attention through signals, colors, and objects, and the witty intervention on the narrow spaces of the gallery and its surroundings to produce this illusion of total immersion among the audience, make Nueva City an experience of undisputable a esthetic and conceptual values.