Carlos Garaicoa Sin título (Árbol) / Untitled (Tree), 2021 Pins and thread on lambda gator, diptych Work: 155 x 255 cm
Through a multidisciplinary approach, Carlos Garaicoa addresses issues of culture and politics with a reflexive lens into architecture, urbanism and history. In his essay, ‘Between Apparatus and Subjectivity: Carlos Garaicoa’s Post-Utopian Architecture’, Okwui Enwezor described his practice,“Garaicoa is perhaps one of the most significant artists of his generation to develop a sustained aesthetic and analytical framework that would fuse the heritage of modern Cuban art and its complex political structure.” Garaicoa combines photographs, drawings and mixed media as forms of intervention to examine architecture and urbanism as mirrors of political reality and social development.
Through black and white photographs, he merges imagery of dilapidated buildings and structures with imaginary buildings whose construction was never completed. The work is a form of criticism against the government, which has not prevented the decay of Havana, since the Cuban revolution. For various years, Garaicoa has been working on a series of black and white mural photographs of different buildings in Havana integrated with thread drawings. In his work, what may seem at first glance as diametrical opposition produces generative intrapsychic tensions that can be explored and reconfigured —cityscape against nature, history against futurity, reconstruction and ruination— sitting squarely at the centre of these tensions.
