CURRENT EXHIBITION

THE GREAT WAVE

 In the same way that Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” obscures one's vision of the sacred Mount Fuji with its immensity, this homonymous work in digital photography, first realized in 1999 by the Cuban artistic duo, Liudmila & Nelson, has been updated in 2023 to a new version where several waves are embedded with the photographs of legal emigrants, randomly placed and growing in a way that swells the tide.

 The image manages to create a visual distortion from the hundreds of snapshots that, like a collage, reconfigures the objectives of the 19th century Japanese woodblock print.

 However, if we zoom in on any part of the work, we realize that every particle of water and earth depicts an instant in the drama of an escape.

The huge liquid mass drags within it an avalanche of individuals in precarious boats in search of a destiny foreign to them. The scale of grays translates into a solemn, apocalyptic phenomenon that has controlled the island of Cuba for more than two decades.

 The indecipherable list of emigrants negates any attempt at identification, in an existential discourse that probes the uncertainty of exile, the nostalgia and the loss of a collective consciousness that makes life whole. The individual who does not know any other way of escape creates his wave, as if he were facing, due to his beliefs, the weight of his own cross.

The supposed calm of the mountainous horizon and the beauty of the stylized wave, constitute a timeless pretext in order to focus on a common form of transit that only gives face to mourning and bewilderment and has become a mechanism of exodus during the tragic geopolitical situation that has shaped our social realities in recent times. 

This piece, conceived as a matrix of anecdotal testimonials, forms a reservoir whose subtext codifies and deciphers one of the most complex scenarios of Cuban reality. The confrontational epicenter that this work embodies leaves us in a suspended tension, in the catharsis of a contained scream, in the disquieting doubt of what is to come, if there is to be a tomorrow.

Yanet Oviedo - Curator and Art Critic
Consejo Nacional de la Artes Plasticas,  Havana, Cuba