Three Cuban photographers have been carrying out an exhibition from 23 June at Photographic Art Albertina Gallery, in Chiapas, Mexico. Territorios intangibles is the display’s title, made up of Leysis Quesada, Mabel Llevat and Liudmila Velasco.
Leysis Quesada has explored documental photography and collage, basically in portraits in which she works a kind of melancholic perspective that undoubtedly goes deep into the subject’s psychological profile –woman– from skin details, wardrobe or hair. Born in the countryside, the artist has warmly photographed the life in Amarillas (Matanzas), her native town, through the people around her. In Territorios… she showcases Vestigios series,in which a gestural painting seems to be placed on top of the faces of girls, women and elderly ladies, but it’s actually all about photographic manipulations by using spots, lines and drawings. The expressions move us: the characters transmit an emphasized loneliness sensation.
On the other hand, Mabel Llevat thinks about photography as a text, whose deconstruction comes from the identification of symbols that make up the whole, and are interconnected through an anecdote, story or a series of elements which recreate certain cultural, geographical and historical identity. Characters of her La Favorita series are “trapped” in a domestic world, marked by the presence of familiar memories, literature and music; and their poses are expressions of the anxiety due to the stopped instant, that also entails waiting. Objects highlight this introspection, by recreating an evocative identity. The formal solution of emphasizing faces as central core of this system stresses the power of thoughts and memories.
Likewise, Liudmila Velasco’s artworks deal with utopias, collective obsessions, what’s hidden and what’s shown, forbidden territories. The series, now exhibited at Albertina gallery, is titled Silencios, and was developed in conjunction with her husband, photographer Nelson Ramirez de Arellano. The pictures transmit an urgent approach on migrations and psychosocial catastrophes they bring about, from autobiographical elements, as Liudmila somehow recalls her arrival to the island from Moscow, when she was seven years old.
Territorios Intangibles
Albertina Gallery of Photographic Art
Insurgentes Ave. 1A, Historic Core, San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico
Through July 31
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