GUSTAVO ACOSTA
A SERIES OF UNCONNECTED THOUGHTS
Gustavo Acosta in his Studio in Miami, Florida Photo Credit: Eliecer Jimenes Almeida
The Limits of A Timeline, 2021 acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 inches
GUSTAVO ACOSTA A SERIES OF UNCONNECTED
THOUGHTS
"This exhibition is a direct product of a specific, unprecedented time, but for art the particularity of a forced confinement can generate surprising results, even more so when collaboration and support exist. In my case, the exhibition and catalog are the result of the enthusiastic and hard work of the LnS Gallery team. To them: Luisa, Sergio, Isa and Sofia, I express thanks for the happy result. To Gory and Adrian for the photos, to Dennys Matos for his dedication and knowledge of the 'curatorial sciences,' to Tatiana and Laura, who are a part of everything. To my friends and my collectors. To those who have survived and those who have left." Gustavo Acosta gustavo acosta | A Series of Unconnected Thoughts essay | Dennys Matos graphic design | Isabella Marie Garcia & Luisa Lignarolo photography | Rogelio López Marin aka GORY essay translation | Gined Vitali-Ganem editorial assistants | Isabella Marie García & Sofía Guerra printing | Bellak Color art installation | Frederic Walter Vega Olivella exhibition date | September 3 - November 6, 2021 isbn | 978-1-7346065-3-9 copyright 2021 | LnS GALLERY
cover | From The Beginning, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 75 inches page 7 | detail of Equilibrio, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 23 x 18 inches back cover | Waking Up With A Question, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 84 inches
2610 SW 28th Lane Miami FL 33133 305 987 5642 INFO@LNSGALLERY.COM WWW.LNSGALLERY.COM
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A Note from LnS It is our honor to present the most recent body of work by Gustavo Acosta, A Series of Unconnected Thoughts. For nearly 20 years, we have admired the virtuousness of one of the most talented expressionist painters today. Throughout each and every one of those years, we have enjoyed experiencing Gustavo’s energetic approach to his storytelling. A Series of Unconnected Thoughts is a compelling group of works which combine reflection on a newly altered reality and deep introspection, giving physical artistic form to the isolated yet universal experience of the past year, 2020. They have a commanding presence and function as complex puzzles that offer clues but resist complete deciphering. This timely exhibition exemplifies not only Gustavo’s unmatched artistic style, but the unique historic moment in which we are currently living. We would like to thank Gustavo for his trust and friendship during the organization of this exhibition. We would also like to acknowledge Dennys Matos for his insightful essay and curatorial perspective. Furthermore, we would like to thank all who form part of our LnS Team; Isabella Marie Garcia, Sofia Guerra, and Frederic Walter Vega Olivella. We invite you all to be captivated with the ambiguous and majestic world of Gustavo Acosta. Luisa Lignarolo and Sergio Cernuda
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Searching for A Happy End, 2020 acrylic on canvas 82 x 91 inches
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Gustavo Acosta of UnconnectedThoughts A Series By Dennys Matos I - Havana, Cuba, 1986 Gustavo Acosta, from the dawn of his career, has been dedicated to the visual language relevant to the current moment. At the II Havana Biennial (1986) Gustavo painted, not precisely in the language of painting, but rather in the symbolic ciphers of drawing, as if the strokes were floating. Against a concert scenery he, among a group of artists, painted. In due time, Acosta allowed the glimpse of an image that could just as easily be stonework for a pre-Hispanic Taino petaloid axe. In any case, the whole thing seemed like a parodic nod to a II Havana Biennial that had already assumed the ideological political posture of the Non-Aligned Movement, whose Sixth Summit Conference, held in Havana in 1979, had elected Fidel Castro as president. From then on, the focus would be on the countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as a counterweight to the “Westernization” of art, the raison d’être of other biennials. It was the 1980s in Cuba and the Revolution in which many believed an openly totalitarian regime was already taking course. However, in the economic arena, compared to the previous decade of food and material shortages, it seemed like things were going to improve. The availability of food products, clothes and shoes increased, almost all of it coming from Eastern Europe. Yet not even with these “improvements” did they close the wounds left by the Mariel emigration of 1980. They taught, on the one hand, that revolution was the noblest work for the socialist present, with the promise of a bright communist future for the nation, for the people, and for their history. On the other hand, Cubans were taken out of schools and workplaces to lynch, for their disagreement, those who the preceding day had been friends and family. All the images of strength and national health enunciated and sedimented by those revolutionary ideological politicians for two decades, came tumbling down. In his first two shows in Havana, an artistic and intellectual dissidence is already perceptible in Gustavo Acosta, unexempt from a romantic aura. Acosta recreates impressions of buildings, places, and constructions from both colonial and republican eras that invite one to remember what the past may have been like, and the history of pre-revolutionary Cuba distilled into a series of graphite drawings on paper. Each image braids a prerevolutionary architectural genealogy into the background of a past presence with the expressionist trace in the foreground, like an energy that pulsates the convulsions of the present. Remaining intertwined are the background and the figure, nature and architectural, and a material culture which has become representative of a fictionalized story driven by totalitarianism. 10
The works from these years untether an imaginary that neither visits nor stops at the revolutionary chronicle instrumentalized by Castro’s absolutism, anchored in its fiefdom of heroes and martyrs. They openly question the idea that “the revolutionary intellectual must direct his work toward the eradication of the vestiges of the old society that subsists in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism.”1 They soar over the material presence of the past, pulsed from the sentimental education of a subject who, while cultivated within the political and ideological pronouncements of the cultural politics of the revolution, feels and revindicates that pre-revolutionary past as part of his personal history. The connection between physical presence, memory, and place, become a metaphorical narration of a history that points to the development of a Cuban modernity outside the revolutionary channels and their openly totalitarian course. The poetic allusions to an architectural and urbanistic patrimony, disguised as a project of modernization and democracy, are transformed within Acosta’s view to both challenge their purpose, and become part of a larger cognitive archive through each work produced. II - Havana, Cuba, 1986 to Madrid, Spain, 2008 In 2008 in Madrid, Acosta’s work continued to investigate the cultural climate of his home country. The regime had entrenched itself in its privileges and the rhetoric of new generations as the promising future of the revolutionary relay was only an alibi for perpetuating the dictatorship; it became clear that the future, its future, belonged entirely to them, and not to us in any way. The ensuing series of work submerges one in a city environment formed by blocks of buildings, desolate and uniformed urban landscapes, whose setting is a hooded and stormy sky. Among the most potent of these structures is a watchtower used to monitor and control the urban perimeter and its surroundings. It acts as a reminder that there is no public space because, as Claude Lefort points out, civil society is confused with the totalitarian state. In these transitional works of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the clarity of the drawings gives way to paintings of figurative abstraction through an ominous palette. They are works that delve into environments of tenebrous light, urban architecture, focused on the spatiotemporal construction of spaces in an effort to capture the transcendence that inhabits our perception of quotidian life. Yet on this tour of introspection, the works give free rein to see a distilled sentiment of deep loneliness. They are paintings that, in the words of Orlando Hernández, “go from the mist to the night, from the gray to the black, from the expression to the reserve, to the whisper, to the secret.”2 These paintings unravel a force whose pressure seeks to break the skin of the paint at any time. An expression without affections, which is also that of a subjectivity accountable to a permanent scrutiny, looks for the voice capable of expanding the convulsive imaginary within. 1. See Declaration of the National Congress of Education and Culture in Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution \ Editorial De Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1981. 2. Orlando Hernández in "The secret weapons of Gustavo Acosta," 1993. Unpublished. 11
Feelings of uprootedness and uncertainty, but also of fascination for what has been lived and for what is still to come, collide dramatically in the outlook of Acosta’s work. Gustavo Acosta’s work exists outside the confines of a singular style and pays homage to the aesthetics of pictorial genres of the past avant-garde and, above all, a revindication of the craft of painting. Within the visual discourse, we witness the building of an architectural and urbanistic topology through edifications, streets and plazas, or monuments. Constructions, all of which can be as much premodern as modern and postmodern, at the verge of death, nascent, or occupied by life. The lives of these buildings are like a pulse of being that moves in the citified welter, seen and projected in their skin. The pathways upon the earth or elevated to the sky, are another of Acosta’s frequented subjects which reflect transit, moments between movement and stillness, and call to the advancement of time and space. In the encounter between the built environment and the memory of its habitation, there is an extraordinary pictorial sensation of the artist whose outlook, raised at the top of his solitude, projects the structures that have marked its existence on the symbolic body of the city. III - Madrid, Spain, 2008 to Miami, Florida, 2011-2021 A Series of Unconnected Thoughts has been put together in the middle of the pandemic, riddled by the lockdown, vast uncertainty, and insecurity. Thinking was not logical, but rather cyclical and often cynical. Life was forever marked by the uncertainty presented and compounded by forced confinement. These works do not respond to, or work for, a particular exhibition idea or project. Acosta sought refuge — painting what was going through his mind, what he enjoyed most, without having to ponder a particular subject or idea. The exhibition is comprised of a select dozen works realized during the pandemic, along with 36 drawings from the same period. Ranging from large format works such as the impressive painting, A Slice of Delirium (2021), through mid-format works such as Equilibrio (Balance) (2020), they trickle to their roots in small format drawings and display varied dimensionality. Wolves and sheep in Equilibrio (Balance) respectively uses the presence of animal life amid the most discarnate urban scenery in a discursive move by the artist. In this relationship, he articulates a new way to fable. It's a dystopian tale that pulls from post-apocalyptic imaginary, where the interlacing images of the animal and human world remind us that human beings are ones that must build to inhabit. Yet, an iconography sneaks in through typological references to observatories, surveillance, and espionage centers so present in the architecture of structures from the Cold War. These are present in works such as From The Beginning (2021). The Unity of Things (2020), Paradox (2020), and Invasive Species (2020), each signaling the presence of constructed elements of the Cold War built into various scenarios: from cities to forests, seas and mountains reflecting the reach of the lands effected by the Cold War. When we look at A Series of Unconnected Thoughts, we discover a renewed Gustavo Acosta, an author with the full awareness of artistic and intellectual maturity. 12
Previously oriented toward solving cumulative language interests, Acosta eventually finds bold solutions in A Series of Unconnected Thoughts. The synthesis of expressions, through figuration, abstraction, and action painting, generate the discourse of Acosta’s work. Acosta returns to vindicate the constellation of pictorial craft with complete vocation. His renderings have imagined premodern colonial and Renaissance city, cities of postmodern rationalist architecture as the apotheosis of late capitalism, and imagined episodes of the communist totalitarianism. A spiritualization of city iconography that navigates between dream and wakefulness, between utopia and the dystopian, between history and fiction, is embodied in an outlook that modulates according to the different stages traversed by the artist. He has imagined the city in ruins from lives lived, the life we live now, and from those which are to come. A Series of Unconnected Thoughts is a compendium of that view where a feeling of rootedness to life flourishes, to its spiritual value connected to social and personal history, but where a feeling of incredulity in the transient also flourishes in the vertigo created by life in a constructed world. The works of this exhibition teach us the tightrope on which the artist's discourse moves in a global society. The artist must be more increasingly local, while at the same time aspiring to be increasingly inclusive3. This may appear contradictory, but the apparent paradox is resolved if it is understood that, true universality is not accomplished from an anonymous non-place, while understanding the recovery of the local can only be accessed from outside the spaces charted by nation-states. Acknowledging this paradox affirms both local rootedness and the universal character, without reducing the latter category to an abstract notion that can be extrapolated to any space and time. All true universality needs to have concrete character. There is a necessity for the concrete just as there is a necessity for the spatial and temporal density that gives us a place to reencounter our entrance to the universe.
3. Dennys Matos in "Occupying, Building, Thinking: Poetic and discursive perpectives on Contemporary Cuban Video Art (1990-2010)," 2013. Contemporary Art Museum Tampa USF, Tampa, Florida, 2013.
Dennys Matos is an independent art critic, curator, lecturer and essayist. He periodically publishes essays and articles on contemporary art in specialized magazines, catalogs and publications such as El Nuevo Herald, ART.Es, Arte y Parte, ArteAllimited, ArtNexus, ArteAldía Internacional, Input Magazine, etc. As an independent curator and project manager, he has participated at international art projects in USA, Spain, Cuba, Austria, Belgium and France with art galleries and institutions such as ARCO Madrid, Fototeca Nacional de Cuba, Ascaso Gallery, CAM Tampa, Durban Segnini Gallery, CCEMiami, Consorcio de Museos Valencia (Spain), Casa América Madrid, Instituto de Cultura Barcelona, Arte y Naturaleza Gespart and the Federal Ministry of Foreign Relations of Germany, among many others. He is an eminent lecturer, collaborating with private and academic institutions like Carleton College (Minneapolis), NYU, USF Tampa, Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Facultad BBAA Pontevedra, University of Georgia, etc. His most recent book is ‘Landscapes. Metaphors of our time’ (Linkgua Editions. Barcelona, 2008).
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Invasive Species, 2020 acrylic on canvas 33 x 35 inches
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A Rusty Feeling, 2021 acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 inches
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The Unity of Things, 2020 acrylic on canvas 72 x 56 inches
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Detail of The Unity of Things, 2020 acrylic on canvas 72 x 56 inches
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A Trilogy, 2020 acrylic on canvas set of three panels 66 x 168 inches in total From Left to Right The Master Plan, 66 x 56 inches Out Of Boundaries, 66 x 56 inches Breaking The Rules, 66 x 56 inches 23
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Equilibrio, 2020 acrylic on canvas 23 x 18 inches
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Connecting The Dots, 2020 acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 inches
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Paradox, 2020 acrylic on canvas 56 x 56 inches
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Agosto, 2020 acrylic on canvas 20 x 84 inches
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A Slice of Delirium, 2021 acrylic on canvas 75 x 118 inches
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GUSTAVO ACOSTA (b. 1958) ARTIST STATEMENT “For years I have thought of my work as an investigation into the human condition, utilizing as testimony not the individual, but the individual’s creative footprint. I have tried to integrate this human restlessness into a new referential system where symbols of ubiquity, reference and temporarily function as if we had discovered a surprising and inexhaustible archive of images, imitating the arbitrary procedures with which our psyches constantly distort, edit, and magnify. Reinterpreting at the convenience of our expectations or priorities creates an illusion; a visual fiction.” SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2019 Gustavo Acosta: Transpositions Latin American Masters, Santa Monica, CA
Gustavo Acosta in Miami, Florida Photo Credit: Rogelio López Marin aka GORY
Born in Havana, Cuba Resides in Miami, Florida EDUCATION School of Visual Arts San Alejandro, Havana, Cuba Superior Institute of Art (ISA), Havana, Cuba PUBLIC COLLECTIONS National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba Wifredo Lam Center, Havana, Cuba National Theatre of Cuba, Havana, Cuba University of Havana, Havana, Cuba Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL Diputacion Provincial de Ciudad Real, Spain Lowe Art Museum at University of Miami, Miami, FL Cuban Heritage Collection at University of Miami, Miami, FL NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY Museum of Contemporary Art, Panama City, Panama Lehigh University Art Galleries Collection, Bethlehem, PA USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL American Career College, Newport, RI
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2018 Structural Narratives Pan American Art Projects, Miami, FL 2017 Inventory of Omissions 532 Thomas Jaeckel Gallery, NY 2016 Paper Trail Pan American Art Projects, Miami, FL 2015 Timeline Latin American Masters, Santa Monica, CA 2014 Space of Silence Caixa Cultural, Sao Paulo, Brazil 2013 Space of Silence Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil There Pan American Art Projects, Miami, FL 2012 A Journal of References Frederic Boloix Fine Arts, Ketchum, ID DUDA Raymaluz Art Gallery, Madrid, Spain 2011 Here Pan American Art Projects, Miami, FL 2010 Gustavo Acosta Frederic Boloix Fine Arts, Ketchum, ID
Art of Illusion Latin American Masters, Santa Monica, CA The Time Machine Lile O.Reitzel Arte Contemporaneo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 2009 The Great Systems Pan American Art Projects, Miami, FL Questions to the Mirror Museum of Contemporary Art, Panama City, Panama
2000 Las Trampas de Saturno Legacy Fine Art, Panama City, Panama Espejismos y Memorias Lyle O.Reitzel Arte Contemporaneo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic Deciphering Echoes Generous Miracles Gallery, New York, NY Hallucinations Elite Fine Art, Miami, FL
2008 Temporary Current Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, AZ
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2015 Iconocracia Centro Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo, Vitoria, Spain
Hipotesis de la Locura Pan American Art Projects, Miami, FL
2013 Flying Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
Transit Zones Latin American Masters, Los Angeles, CA Recent Works Pan American Art Projects, Dallas, TX
2011 Florida Contemporary 2011 Patty & Jay Baker Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL
2007 The News of the Day Alonso Art Gallery, Miami, FL
2008 Visiones: 20th Century Selections from the Nassau County Museum of Art Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL
Selección de Paginas Art @ Work, Miami, FL
Unbroken Ties NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL
2006 Los Juegos del Principe Nina Menocal Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico
2006 Layers: Collecting Cuban-American Art University at Buffalo Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
2005 Empire of Dreams Latin American Masters, Los Angeles, CA
1989 XX Bienal de Sao Paulo Sao Paulo, Brazil
2004 Historias Recurrentes Praxis International Art, Coral Gables, FL
1987 Bienal de Cuenca Cuenca, Ecuador
Del Manual Ilusionista Praxis International Art, New York, NY
SELECTED AWARDS 1992 Medalla de Oro en Pintura Primera Bienal del Caribe, Dominican Republic
2003 Viajando de Incognito Lyle O. Reitzel Arte Contemporaneo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic El Forastero Klaus Steinmetz Arte Contemporaneo. San Jose, Costa Rica 2002 Books of Hours Elite Fine Art, Miami, FL
Medalla de Oro por el pais mejor representado, Primera Bienal del Caribe, Dominican Republic Premio en Pintura del LVII Salon Nacional de Arte, Valdepenas, Spain 1991 Premio en Pintura Salon UNEAC, Havana, Cuba
Teorema de las Islas Galeria Tamara. San Juan, PR
1988 Premio en Pintura III Bienal de Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador
2001 Recent Works Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC
1984 Premio Nacional de Dibujo Primera Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba
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A Series of Unconnected Thoughts, 2020 mixed media on paper series of 36 12 x 12 inches each