Charo Oquet’s artistic tensions: A language for these times YOLANDA WOOD

Artworks tend to reflect contemporary nuance and tensions, and in Charo Oquet’s work these bursts through with great force, the result of creation in a powerful triangular space, defined by an imaginary shape linking the Greater Antilles and the southern United States.

In this part of the world, we are accustomed to critical triangulations - that of the Bermudas, to mention a geographical example. The configuration where Charo Oquet’s artistic tensions are located have their apex in Miami, where the artist lives. The foundation of this symbolic triangle is the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic - the latter is where Charo was born. Emerging between these socio-cultural coordinates is the work of an artist distinguished by its conceptual maturity and a very personal artistic approach within the current landscape of the Caribbean.

In Charo’s assemblies, she is interested in the ways use of objects and other resources can shift their original meanings – allowing them to acquire new values through artistic manipulation. These new meanings form not only from the creative process itself, but also by their new functions - aesthetic and communicative - that are established in context,

Miami Rara, processional performance, Institute of Contemporary Art of Miami (ICA), Miami, FL2017 photo Javier de Pisón and in dialogue with spectators. The treatment of recycled materials in her installations, for example, is located in a triangle of tension where the common definition of the objects is modified. Charo’s work using these materials situates them between dazzling Miami accumulation and alluring consumerism, and the bases of her triangle – Haiti and the Dominican Republic - where the use and reuse of the already-used becomes part of the everyday world of domestic poverty and informal market.

The artist revisits these universes and operates - consciously - with her artistic materials, with all the energy that they preserved, with the tactile memory which they carry in mind. This is how she throws herself into the mysterious journey of the imagination with surprising creative capacity. By employing what overflows in Miami’s flea markets - clothes, stuffed animals - and relocating them, values are reversed to evoke their opposites in the field of insecurity and deterioration. The artist provokes a magical reallocation of meaning between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of this triangle – with all the implications this has on its north-south axis in the global world.

Miami Flyers, Here and Now Festival ,Miami Light Project, Miami, Fl, 2016

The forces of ancestral African divinities also feature in this zone of tension. Spiritual beings have traveled with the Antillian diasporas, in both their legal and illegal migrations, creating a cultural geography. People have carried their universes of reference in their imaginations, and they are present, in a space to be received. The artist appropriates these values and is immersed in the theatricality of performance; her body is covered with symbolic clothing. After the act - with its transvestisms and configurations - a liberating subject is constructed, emancipatory for spirits and investigative of gender identity through a legitimization of certain female roles and their ways of seeing and understanding the world, through a mythical universe. This journey, in an area of contact with supernatural forces, generates a sensitive place of solemn spirituality in Charo’s work that comes from popular culture

Charo shows a deep connection to her country of origin and its conflicts, including contemporary political and social issues, such as the territorial and border limits within the interior of the island, and its impact and significance in the racial and cultural imaginary of the two sides. Charo does not evade these circumstances and she involves herself; this is why her work transcends and remains in the critical area of the triangle. Her art does not neglect the persistent presence of memory as an essential quality in the complexity of the language of the times.

Mexico City, September 30, 2015

Engungu in White – A celebration of our ancestors and a community spiritual cleaning, Be.Bop European Body Politics , Spiritual Revolutions & the Scramble for Africa: Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark , 2014 Cuatro Vientos (Four Winds), residency and performance, ACCIONArar, Anolaima, Colombia, 2016 photo: Tzitzi Barrantes