About RECARGABLE, Jorge Luis Santana, personal exhibition

By Teresa Bustillo 

Translated by: Jorge A. Vasconcelos and Roger A. Blanco

Santana's work, viewed in a holistic sense, could be classified as coherent. Since his irruption in the Cuban art gallery networks, almost 20 years ago, this author made evident his preference towards less conventional morphologies, in contrast to the regular praxis and uses in the early 90s. Instead of using only the almost prevalent painting or sculptural ceramic, Santana bet for a hybrid conception that has shaken the environment of the most refined plastic arts in Camagüey. Gradually, his installations became more common in every exhibition space. His pieces of art gave the object a new meaning, and most of all tended to model an effective poetry-like visual speech. Thus, the artist has trained and gotten both the critic and the public, into the habit of a rather unfinished, open dialog, which seeks lot more profound readings, still in times of simplicity.

Rechargeable is a display which springs from several concepts. Firstly, memory, which allows us to exist sometimes in a past one has not even lived in, and re-read such a past without the contamination that comes with promptness. In this case, our memory finds reference to texts expressed in previous works and that are now re-presented as mere semantic triggers of already distant images. Secondly, the discursive interconnection among the art pieces, once every single piece can work not only as self-sufficient individual entities, but also as possible inter-textual complements for more complex levels of significance. And, finally, it is worth mentioning the ways this author uses the daily lexicon in order to change the literal expression into evident elevated metaphors: probably one of the most staggering cornerstones of Santana´s work.

By systematizing a very personal poetic interpretation, Rechargeable displays the visual versatility of Jorge Luis Santana´s, who accurately manages both environments and foundations. Therefore, from the election of the title up to the way in which the pieces are mapped, this is an exhibition that evokes an immediate past to chart, as a fortuneteller does, the future of the artist´s work.