The Illusion: A Form of Seduction

Florencio Gelabert Soto (Havana, 1961) emerged with its own light in the panorama of Cuban sculpture at the beginning of the eighties through a unique way of expression: he employed ruins built with concrete, marble chips and steel sheets. This form of representation was in that period a differentiated treatment of the expression, generally marked by the presence of memorials and patriotic monuments as well as a strong formal and geometric imprint in its many variants. The first installations and objects in Cuban art appeared amidst this scenario, made by artists linked to other expressions, where it is notable the poetry of this young artist, son of modernist sculptor and academic Florencio Gelabert Pérez (1904-1995).

Despite being a graduate of San Alejandro and the Higher Art Institute, Gelabert Soto, from early in his career, distanced himself from the precepts that held the Academy, and from the traditional concepts that marked the Cuban sculpture then, to go for a renovating and experimentalart. He appropriated a new aesthetics, supported in part by the Arte Povera; he assumed the sculpture from the deconstruction of three-dimensional shapes and from an audacious perspective marked by his conceptual concerns, which places him as a pioneer of avant-garde art of his generation. His formal and unbiased attempts had hybrid effects: the pieces move between residual art and post-minimalism, based in turn on popular cultural roots that consolidate hisprofessional, technical and humanistic formation. Among the pieces of that initial stage, Homenaje a la columna is a synthesis of his searches.

In his first personal exhibition, Sculptures (House of Culture Plaza, Havana, 1984), Gelabert received the national critics acclaim. Then his stay in New York as part of an artists' residence (1988-1989) earned him a world of enriching experiences: Projects and sculptures, in Socrates Sculpture Park, boosted his integration to the Cuban diaspora. Settled in the USA since 1990, his career then blunted with greater international scope. He began to make works in which he gradually abandoned the building of forms to undertake their deconstruction, combining architectural fragments and organic elements (for example Compression, piece exhibited at the Socrates Sculpture Park).

The Seasons (Intar Art Gallery, NY, 1997), Beyond Violence (Fort Lauderdale Museum, 1998) and Forest Sound (Ambrosino Gallery, Miami, 1998, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacobo Borges, Caracas, 1998, Museum of Contemporary Art in Panama, 1999), his following personal exhibitions, showed his career projection in various cultural contexts. The works of this period are strongly marked by the presence and recreation of objects, from the use of wood and metal (Sacred Labor, 1996)

Although early in his career the aesthetic sense of the object was fundamental- in the structure of a column, the ruins of walls or architectural imaginary fragments of the cityscape, which allude to its physical destruction, both real and fictional- in the first decade of the XXI Century Gelabert incorporates trash as an entity, which is not surprising if we consider that during the nineties he used charcoal, wax and clay. Its Occupied Space, 1998, was paradigmatic in this respect, as it was conceived and produced with mud and water, and exhibited at the 3rd Biennial American Clay, at the Museum Alejandro Otero, Caracas. This has been an intense phase in the artist's career, in which he participated in the Biennial of Uppsala, Sweden, 2000, (S) Files Biennial, Neighborhood Museum, NY, 2007 and the 31st Biennial Pontevedra, Galicia, 2010,among others. His work Column of trees was part of temporary public art program held in Marcus Garvey Park, New York, and The Forest Gate, was commissioned, produced and installed in the gardens of Miami Dade College, Florida, both in 2006. In 2008 the Florida International University acquired Columnof trees II for his sculptures park, and that same year invited him to hold a personal exhibition, Intersections, on the occasion of the opening of the Frost Art Museum.

From a questioning attitude, the author begins to use in hisworks all sorts of detritus to reveal the environmental pollution due to the negligent human activity which can damage the ecosystem and the individual. His work focuses on imaginary landscapes, recreated or implied, on sites and large-scale specific installations, occupying floors and walls, as The sewage, made for the 31st Biennial Pontevedra, Galicia, 2010, where he creates a kind of synthetic neo-nature, thus establishing an ambiguous relationship between fantasy and reality associated with postulates of environmental and social character.

His latest solo exhibition, Traces (Villa Manuela Gallery, 2011), is a categorical sign of his constant evolution, as it establishes connections with his early works due to the presence of architectural ruins, conjugated with elements related to more recent stages of his career such as artificial plants, aqueous spills and trash.

This new thematic repertoire goes through acceptance and rejection at the same time, and provides a play between the ugly and the beautiful, the repulsiveand the agreeable, relying on the tracking of reality from an aesthetic discourse of bias, one might say, dramatic. For this sample he created four sculptures inspired in waste materialsand architectural debris broken down by its timelessness, resolved with simple materials and demonstrating, once again, a safe and full mastery of the craft. He conjugated conventional construction materials and other synthetic materials, as well as food waste in colorful, grotesque and even violent pieces, conceived with some abstract spirit and framed in an atmosphere that enhances their concerns about the environment.

The deployment of these elements in space revealed one of his initial conceptual budgets: architecture and its ruins, taken with a reflexive sense. Similarly, Gelabert rescues in the sample practices and trades such ascabinetmaking, linked to the roots of the academic, popular, and sculptural tradition, and associated to the post-minimalist representation. In forming environments and objects with aging pipes, panels of hydrocal (Pladur ®), PVC films, industrial foam, organic waste, and promoting the presence of feces through imitation, he explored the historical, social and cultural aspects.

Gelabert proposes a geography that reveals the human footprint from a playful attitude, witty and open. He also reinterprets the traditional "still life" with nontraditional media which interact between the works and the viewers. His research spirit and intellectual aspirations mark the challenge of his creation with a vision that combines illusion, simulation concepts and different realities.

Apower of confrontation with the environmental conflicts springs from The pipe, consisting of two PVC tubes simulating rusty metal pipes discharging a viscous substance on a mirror surface covered by various recycled items (food, flowers, artificial feces and Cuban beer and soft drinks containers). The assembly of this piece reinforces the theatrical and dramatic interest that underlies in much of his work today.

Starting sometimes from reality, Gelabert constructs a series of evocative landscapes where the grotesque is the essence of this work which refers us to a situation created by man against himself. We face a work that challenges the viewer by its impact and visual expressiveness. Provocative art eliminates the superfluous from the existential concerns and appeals to the public's shrewd interpretation, turned in an ironic comment or accomplice of the visual metaphor.

The sui generis atmosphere, the perspective and the design, along with the creative acuity and experimentation, provide The exit with synthesis and balance in which violence and illusion are combined:  it rescues ancient craft of carpentry and technical virtuosity when two beams made of wood and metal appearance, burst dramatically into the wall to destabilize the environment. The importance acquired by artificial plants transcends to turn these fantasies organic components that symbolize life and growth in line with the reality of ecological movements.

His turning reality into a problem is a denunciation of cities deterioration witha sharp and unbiased look of the urban cityscape. He recreates any latitude, either New York or Havana, and shows despicable aspects of a city presenting dirty and degraded areas, overrun by decay, moving towards the their ruins...

On his current performance, the artist himself said: "For over two decades I have used a range of materials of everyday use and of construction to create sculptures that transform objects, sometimes utilitarian and other times imaginary places where the universal is transformed by destruction. With different ways of processing and production, my work resists to the definition of direct speeches, offering instead a fusion of several readings, evoking resonant themes such as identity, loss, pollution, mortality and poetry. In Footprints I am interested in notions of time, destruction, eschatology and identity. The exhibit is a fracture zone, in which the contemplative creation is used for the reflection of the human and his environment, moving between the disparate communication, the contrasting forms and the metaphorical possibilities. While these four sculptures mark a new and significant relationship between the ephemeral quality and the durability of materials, they also have the explicit reference to previous work, which emphasize my continued interest in a spectrum of materiality and minimal space, between the beauty, the ugly and the loss. My intention is to link the material with the lived experience, taking advantage of the nature and the common ground of these works to create a dynamic environment where space becomes the shape and the movement to generate expectancy”. (New York, December 18, 2011)

In the official list of the Eleventh Havana Biennial, Gelabert was included in the Detrás del muro with Islas... para un amigo (Islands ... for a friend), an ephemeral installation.The piece consisted of three small islands or silhouettes of plywood mounted on styrofoam plates, covering an area of about 25 m long and 2.5 m wide and anchored in front of the rocky coast of Havana coastline. This new Gelabert’s work altered the seafront perception, not only through its physical presence, but with the reflection and continuity of a work that seeks the visual shock of theviewer through the use of remnants of furniture, plastic containers, tree branches, artificial plants and a colorful conglomeration of debris, illuminated by solar panels in the hours of less daylight. His Islands ... invaded in silence our sea, and in the event’s opening, as a performance, Gelabert Soto cut the moorings of steel cables that tied them to the seabed, in an act of total liberation. The work came alive and looked his way overseas, to reaffirm how his game of facing space brings a new form of seduction.