![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.palabranueva.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/foto-expo-14.jpg\")
<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThe exhibition inside
The image without limits… it consisted of one hundred photographs belonging to fifty lens artists (two works per capita). Apparently, the small exhibition space conditioned the sample. Obviously, it’s not all that they are, but it must be said that they are all who are.
According to the catalogue, the exhibition was structured into five sections: a) beginning of photography on the island (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries); (b) the Republic (1902-1959), with the Photographic Club of Cuba as the epicenter; c) the 1960s, the epic and the 1970s; (d) the change and arrival of the postmodern; (e) the 21st century, hybridization of international visual codes.
The beginning of photography on the island was represented by two works by the Spaniard Jos\u00e9 G\u00f3mez de la Carrera, both related to the war of 1895 and of remarkable historical-social value. Interestingly, the war feud was absent in them because the soldiers (in the field) pose relaxed for the camera, and the troop marching towards the countryside from Villanueva station appears surrounded by a crowd that fires it as if it were a social event.
The six decades of the Republican period were covered by two dozen pieces covering nude, portrait of famous figures (in different planes, actions and attitudes), abstraction, the city, student demonstrations, the folkloric, architecture, the personification of spaces, and that unclassifiable jewel of Ernesto Fern\u00e1ndez that transcends his time (1957): the Mart\u00ed of civic Square.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the epic, the political figures, the brigadiers, the macheteros, the builders, the parades, the rallies, dominated the public scene, but the curator managed to provide a representation that synthesizes those themes and overwhelms the circumstances.
Periods ranging from the 1980s to the present day occupied half the sample and, in some images, the boundaries between postmodern arrival and continuity, hybridization of visual codes, were porous.
Postmodernity, as is well known, was late here, but the visual arts were at the forefront, brought it closer and represented. During the 1980s, the so-called plastic arts shocked artistic and cultural structures in a way that has not been repeated on the island. With their actions, young painters, sculptors, engravers, cartoonists, photographers, refreshed the air that creation needs, gagged in the previous decade. Just one of his most explosive samples, in Fine Arts, was called Soft and Fresh.
From then on, Cuban visual artists made the leap necessary to place the the same in their universal time. Therefore, the empathy of the curator of The Image Without Limits is understandable… with the last four decades of photographic art. In the half-hundred pieces that represented them, were the multiple codes and shapes that are common to photography in the orb, including digital manipulation; works that also share topics of global interest, but pay special attention to local issues, issues and motifs.
In the article under his signature in the catalogue, Rafael Acosta mentions the exhibition entitled Photography in Cuba. Retrospective exhibition, which occupied the National Museum in 1983. And it points to three aspects that differentiate that exhibition from this: (a) the large space at its disposal (the entire MNBA building), which allowed seven hundred works to be housed; (b) insufficient information in the catalogue; c) the thirty-five years between samples, a temporary space where new actors who changed the history of island photography were registered.
We will add an observation regarding the 1983 exhibition. The sample catalogue contained nine illustrations. One of them was Joaquin Blez’s famous nude. It seems that one of the curators felt modesty (or fear?) by including the piece and wrote the following: “Is the whole of Blez’s work paradigm of an aristocratizing and evasive worldview that, despite its high artistic quality \u2013 which, among other things, makes it recoverable for the heritage of our socialist culture \u2013 does not have a single point of contact with the convulsive reality in which it unfolded?”
Thirty-five years ago, those things were said. How much we must thank the visual artists who burst with their irreverent energy to change history, to break down the walls imposed on creation, to make possible an image without limits. \u03a9<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"