“Open Strings” or “The Spiritual in Art” by Chaliang Merino

 “Colour is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.”

Wassily Kandinsky

After several months of working persistently, Imago Art Gallery opened its doors on August of 2009, with the show “Quintessence” featuring pieces of five Cuban artists. Their artworks were impregnated by an intense symbolism that seemed to call not only for the instauration of aesthetic dialogues but also for the mobilization of critical and analytical enterprises. Since then, Imago has promoted young contemporary art by means of fomenting systematic gatherings, moments in which ideas can converge, and other strategic spaces that invite the audiences to reflect deeply about the artistic object.

The pluralistic character of Imago can be considered a sine qua non condition because of the diversity of expressions, proposals and voices involved in the project. The works of Lourdes Porrata, Fernando García, Robert Brown, José Rementería, Gabriel Tejera and Roel Crespo many times have confronted the anxious, eager sense of the spectators without reservation. In this regard, the exhibition “Open Strings” will also try to motivate us to think of the art pieces, using our senses as openly as possible.

Both artists Ariel Tejera and Josevelio Rodríguez are concerned with exploring sensorial reception in their works. Chords and stories become fervent “capriccios” producing “open strings,” shapes that recall the mystical in art, a subtle state of the soul wanting to apprehend messages and thoughts in their most genuine expressions. All the arts become a unit, and music is an abstract representation of the concept of art, with extended rests, delicate vibrations and uninhibited ventures. “Open Strings” plays not only with contrapuntal diagrams, but it also presents a significant collection of interludes, tempos and fugues that occupy the living space, making the exhibition transcend the “artistic” in itself.

The “Guitáforas” of Josevelio Rodríguez emerge out of a deep inner need. Through his free chromatic compositions conveying accentuated contours, lines with an elastic quality, geometrically-undefined figures, as well as the fusion of elements that can be discernable or veiled, the artist seeks to bring to light the forms’ innate sound. These musical metaphors make reference to the most spiritual and sensual instrument, the guitar, and they disclose the artist’ gynocentric point of view. As we may guess, women are poetic indications of the beginning and the end in Josevelio Rodríguez’s illustrative madrigals.

  

 Tejera, on the other hand, deliberately manipulates the viewer by showing detailed and lively arrangements in which the slightest modification would generate chaotic results. The artist’s career has always been imbued with an intense desire for a conceptual and technical searching that connects his pieces to surrealist constructions and the symbolic style used by Magritte in his “irreconcilable realities.” For this show, Tejera’s recurring commentaries on identity and other similar issues are accompanied by a faraway melodic feeling, calm tonalities that spread out into silent spiritual vibes. His work contains a chromatic harmony helping the image’s interior resonance proliferate.

As any dynamic process of perception requires a suitable use of its abstract codes, Imago Gallery stirs up our sensorial system in the course of this exhibition that possesses a profound symbolic substance. Like Kandinsky, who dealt with the power of having concentrated synesthetic experiences, “Open Strings” gives us the chance to come into contact with diagrammatic melodies, unseen vibrations and a spiritual notion of art.