Entitled Birlibirloque, the exhibition includes photographs, sculptures and photographic and sculptural installations, all of them with the characteristic union of the Cuban artist with a meticulously exquisite aesthetic and a critical political commitment.
“Birlibirloque” is an odd hybrid Spanish word that refers to doing or accomplishing something skillfully but without revealing (again, skillfully) the means by which said thing was done or accomplished. “As if by magic,” in other words, and as such it is often proclaimed, abracadabra-like, at the climactic moment of a magic trick, the moment of transformation, disappearance or reappearance. It is in this sense that Carlos Garaicoa has chosen the word as the title for his current exhibition at the Galería Elba Benítez, an exhibition haunted throughout with a spirit of disappearance and transformative reappearance.
The centerpiece of Birlibirloque is a series of photo-sculptural installations of the same name (Birlibirloque, 2018). Each installation consists of a pair of black-and-white photographs and a glass sculpture. One of the pair of photos depicts a semi-ruined building in an urban setting; the other shows the same site after the building has been razed, the space it filled now filled by air, its absence oddly palpable, like that of a missing tooth in a mouth. On a pedestal in front of the photos Garaicoa has placed blocks of glass within which a sort of 3-D rendering of the same building has been etched, as if the building’s essence (or perhaps its ghost) were hovering spectrally within a protective transparent encasement.
Like so much of Garaicoa’s work, these installations are, in a very fundamental way, about loss. In this sense, there is a quality of pathos or melancholy to them, a melancholy rooted in the inexorable passage of time. But, again like much of Garaicoa’s work, they are in an equally fundamental way about responding to loss, a response that is enacted not through documentation or reconstruction but rather through transformation into something else, somewhere else. To put it another way, in an artistic recherche du temps perdu such as this, the return does not retrace its steps to a long- vanished starting point but rather leads to a different destination: it leads into the realm of art.
Other works in the exhibition Birlibirloque share this symbiotic enmeshing of photography, architecture, sculpture and drawing — indeed, it might be considered a signature characteristic of Garaicoa’s practice as a whole. For instance, the urban vistas of Pliegues that fold and unfold within their vitrines like the lived experience of the city itself, transitory, partial, subjective and, to a degree, always at a remove. Or the photographs of disused urban spaces that are converted, through the photographic act, into geometric studies of the fraying fringes of the built environment. It is this transformative spirit that drives the exhibition Birlibirloque, the impulse toward something else, somewhere else. The city is brought into the gallery. The past is brought into the present. What was lost becomes what is. As if by magic.
The centerpiece of Birlibirloque is a series of photo-sculptural installations of the same name (Birlibirloque, 2018). Each installation consists of a pair of black-and-white photographs and a glass sculpture. One of the pair of photos depicts a semi-ruined building in an urban setting; the other shows the same site after the building has been razed, the space it filled now filled by air, its absence oddly palpable, like that of a missing tooth in a mouth. On a pedestal in front of the photos Garaicoa has placed blocks of glass within which a sort of 3-D rendering of the same building has been etched, as if the building’s essence (or perhaps its ghost) were hovering spectrally within a protective transparent encasement.
Like so much of Garaicoa’s work, these installations are, in a very fundamental way, about loss. In this sense, there is a quality of pathos or melancholy to them, a melancholy rooted in the inexorable passage of time. But, again like much of Garaicoa’s work, they are in an equally fundamental way about responding to loss, a response that is enacted not through documentation or reconstruction but rather through transformation into something else, somewhere else. To put it another way, in an artistic recherche du temps perdu such as this, the return does not retrace its steps to a long- vanished starting point but rather leads to a different destination: it leads into the realm of art.
Other works in the exhibition Birlibirloque share this symbiotic enmeshing of photography, architecture, sculpture and drawing — indeed, it might be considered a signature characteristic of Garaicoa’s practice as a whole. For instance, the urban vistas of Pliegues that fold and unfold within their vitrines like the lived experience of the city itself, transitory, partial, subjective and, to a degree, always at a remove. Or the photographs of disused urban spaces that are converted, through the photographic act, into geometric studies of the fraying fringes of the built environment. It is this transformative spirit that drives the exhibition Birlibirloque, the impulse toward something else, somewhere else. The city is brought into the gallery. The past is brought into the present. What was lost becomes what is. As if by magic.
George Stolz
