From October 20, 2006 through November 22, 2006

By Holland Cotter
Source: New York Times, Art in Review, Nov 17, 2006 and Lombard-Freid Projects
Picture: Photography by Carlos Garaicoa

The visionary Cuban Conceptual artist Carlos Garaicoa has made a specialty of recovering and reimagining urban architectural histories, viewing the city itself as an epic project in a state of perpetual incompletion. Since the late 1980s he has often taken his own city, Havana, which is in an advanced state of decrepitude, as his subject, and he does again in this show.

He has walked its streets, and in drawings, sculptural models and altered photographs he has symbolically repaired its buildings, uncovered their hidden meanings and proposed new structures. In its goals his work is less utopian than investigative and critical. The large black-and-white photographs in this show, displayed on the wall or projected onto the gallery floor, are of Havana hotels, nightclubs and department stores, named by the commercial signage on their facades. In each case the artist has altered the signage, either by respelling it or adding phrases in Spanish, with the changes spelled out in thread on the surface of the picture.

The name RCA Victor is incorporated into a new enigmatic phrase, “Filthy victory that honors us/unspeakable life/the one that we honor.” To the name La Epoca on a storefront, the words “misery doesn’t care about this era” have been added. The city becomes a moralizing poem, its hidden realities and lost dreams teased out in new words.

Mr. Garaicoa has done similar projects in the United States, including New York City. Under the present administration, however, his applications for visas to travel here have been denied. He shipped his current show from Cuba, along with the work of another artist, Ezequiel Suarez, founder of an experimental apartment gallery in Havana called the Melting Pot, which has nurtured artists whose work has run into trouble with the Cuban government. Mr. Suarez’s small show, in a back gallery, is a delight, and heartening evidence that art and ideas will travel even when artists cannot.
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Ezequiel Suarez

In 1995, when Ezequiel Suarez created together with Sandra Ceballos “The Espacio Aglutinador”(The Melting Pot) in their tiny apartment in Havana, every young artist in Cuba agreed that there was a turning point in the city cultural landscape. Those ignored or banned by the state sponsored cultural organizations finally found a venue for their works.

Lombard-Freid Projects is pleased to premiere Ezequiel Suarez in the United States.

The installation presented in the gallery titled Salón Rojo/ Red Saloon (2006), consists of a mural composition made out of old postcards, sculptural pieces displayed on multiple pedestals and a Cuban flag made out of paper, anchoring the gallery wall.

Lombard-Freid Projects
531 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through Wednesday