Osy Milian

Osy Milian – ALL ABOUT HERSELF

Osy Milian

Osy Milian (*1992, Havana) places images of herself in the center of her paintings. They are obviously not traditional self-portraits, one of the most established genres in the history of western art. But whoever sees these works will remember the words of Pablo Picasso: “At first, self-portrait is a apprenticeship and later it becomes a representation; here is how I see myself, here is how I think I saw myself.”

The artist represents her personal experiences in a very distinctive way. She calls “Fragments” both the group of works and, of course, each one of them separately, which may suggest links of a broken chain that the viewer must either put together or for which he must find a meaning. Many people understand fragmenting to mean taking apart, dividing, or breaking up a unit. Here, however, the fragmentation is only a pretext for the self-representation of a life’s moments; experiences of the artist as an individual, and at the same time as a person who communicates with other parts of her generation’s group memory.

This is how one arrives at the conclusion – one of the many possible in the face of the diversity of arguments she proposes – that Osy is much more interested in creating the sensation of a shared mystery rather than the certainty of a temporary truth.

That projection is partially due to her appropriation of pop art expressions with the same free and easy manner with which that movement has been understood in Cuba since the  1960s when Raúl Martínez, an internationally renowned master, went from epic figuration to the colloquial and daily narrative within the pop orbit.

Although in the case of Osy Milián one is inclined to associate certain of her – nowadys rarely applied – representational methods with those employed in his day by the Dutch painter  M. C. Escher.

In addition to Osy Milian’s self-representation, all the works manifest an evident interest in publicly exposing her private life, an impression that intensifies as one looks at the pictures. It’s as though the artist had decided to open up to the audience, to reveal her angels and demons – fragments of her own existence – to confront her own privacy with the audience’s.

One must also take into consideration that the artist is not just representing herself, but offering an interpretation – at times lyrical – of the images that obsess her. These are other fragments: other pages of her diary, observations where reality mixes with dreams and vice versa.

Thus, a strong chromatic gradation stands out in these medium and large format acrylic canvases. One recognizes her need to find herself, alienated for a moment in Osy Misses You ; the possibility of physical displacement through a bird’s flight in Non-geographical Dimension; or the ambiguity of Displacement, where the young woman contemplates the flight of a bird… is it the bird that flies away or her thoughts that go with it?

Birds appear repeatedly as symbol of journeys, of covering a distance, of freely moving from one place to another in all the above-mentioned works, as well as in Birds  – a nest holding small birds –, and finally in Splash – a bright-feathered flamingo in midst of a beautiful and colorful vegetation.

I like to think of Me  and You as a soft-colored diptych; at first sight Beat Me could be a strictly self-referential piece, but the flower introduces a visual element that shows a way of seeing the world that is connected with certain post-modern readings from the times when pop was a fury.

In Self-portrait, her head and hair are totally covered; only her eyes are to be seen. She needs nothing more; those eyes express the living intensity of the character, of the artist herself. Insomnia  strongly approaches poster design with the use of graphics.

Fragments is an exercise of shameless artistic voyeurism, a visit to the physical and mental intimacy of a young artist who invites us to meet her.

Virginia Alberdi – Havana, Autumn 2017

 

Carlos Quintana - KONTEMPLATION

Carlos Quintana – CONTEMPLATION –

Carlos Quintana: Contemplation as a synthesis of Santería and Buddhism

Carlos Quintana is one of the most internationally renowned Cuban contemporary artists. His work is influenced by many cultural influences, both of his home country and from his living and traveling abroad

Carlos Quintana - CONTEMPLATION

Carlos Quintana: Contemplation as a synthesis of Santería and Buddhism

The figures and portraits of Quintana have in common a self-contained attitude: the distance, emotionless facial expressions and the barely comprehensible gaze, which characterize the figures of Carlos Quintana, testify to a kind of introversion or rather to contemplation. They are focused on something that seems to be outside of the visible or internally. The figures are often depicted against a contrasting colored background and without a concrete environment: whatever is not relevant for the “contemplation” (the title of the exhibition) is consequently left out by the artist. Much of these artworks remain implicitly, “unfinished” and thus develop a peculiar force, as it stimulates thought and imagination – thus animating the audience to continue the process of contemplation initiated by the artist into and for himself.

About the Artist

Carlos Quintana was born in 1966 in Havana. As a young painter and autodidact, he came into contact with contemporary Cuban artists and from then on took part in exhibitions. In 1993 he emigrated to Spain and stayed abroad for more than 10 years. He traveled widely and exhibited in Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico and the United States, among others. During his travels and exhibitions, he consolidated his work, which became increasingly independent and finally earned him international recognition. Since 2006 he lives in Cuba again, but he travels all over the world. Meanwhile, he has become one of the internationally most recognized Cuban contemporary artists.

More About the Artist

Purchase works from Carlos Quintana online on Artsy

Osy-Invite-Eng

Osy Milian – FRAGMENTS –

ARTIST’S EXHIBITION CONCEPT
– Havana, 2017 –

In a Net Art piece in which the spaces of art and life were intermingled, the Italian couple known as the  01 exposed their private life in a website that enabled users to see what they were doing at that moment, regardless of the time of day or night. With that gesture they put on the table the topic of privacy in the internet era, treating their own life as a work of art .

Similarly, the recording of time in diaries and man’s need to leave written memory of the events that mark his life led OnKawara to use the artistic product as record: a document of the artist’s life with dates that could be irrelevant to those who were not familiar with the event they were marking.

The debate between private and public , as well as the work considered “intimate”, existential, or self-referential are concepts that have been addressed many times from diverse points of view. However – and in spite of the great movement in recent times of art toward themes that increasingly deride the individual’s active involvement within society – the artist’s life has not ceased to arouse interest as part of the work he creates.

It is an unquestionable fact that anyone conceiving any product (artistic or not) starts out as an individual . Due to this condition inherent to every creative act, the work is inevitably permeated by the experiences, philosophical concepts, beliefs, and postures of the one who produces it, and therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, every work may be considered “self-referential .”

On the other hand, the work of art that reflects upon itself (or meta-discourse) is a topic that has been devoted to research on the nature of the artistic product. The most explored area has perhaps been the one concerning the means that art employs to convey its message, and therefore the inquiry about the medium became the leitmotif of much of the symbolic production in past decades. And of all explored media, one could say that the one that most exploited its own discursive capacities was painting . So much so, that the symbolical voiding entailed by Malevich’s suprematism and Andy Warhol’s pop art (e.g. White on White and the endless Campbell soup cans) announced the impending death of painting. Nevertheless, painting continued to exist , and that was the most surprising of all.

Today there is still a search regarding the capacities and discourses of painting as medium , and even though this subject has been over-exploited from the point of view of semiotics, or even from its formal aspect, many sides of the phenomenon as well as interpretative readings can still be energized.

From among this great mixture of ideas (art-life relation, monographs, public-private space, painting’s reflection of itself) I have developed this perhaps chaotic proposal to show how I am revealing my intimate nature to the public with the greatest possible sincerity. In the debate that mixes discourses from different periods of my creative history, the pieces are presented arbitrarily, decentered, without any logical order. This sample (and I write sample because it is neither exhibition nor open studio , readymade, site specific, or environment, and yet it is all that at the same time) may cause visual trouble, fatigue, and confusion. The works have not been displayed to enable reading; they are not “curated” in the traditional way but presented in the space just like they were conceived. If they were painted on the floor, on a staircase, dried in front of a ventilator or on an easel – that is how they will be shown in the symbolic space of the gallery. And I refer to the gallery as symbolic space because we well know that if at some point the gallery was a validating space, it now is a neutral space that can turn formal or alternative according to the circumstances (the space does not validate the work, the work constructs the space).

The proposal is supported by that over-saturation of information present in today’s society , and uses as reference the arbitrariness of the internet. It created an ensemble in which one thing does not necessarily have to do with the other, since it becomes a bombardment of diverse unrelated data. In the same way as in the web , it is possible to find the slogan of an environmental summit, an invitation to visit a porno website, or receive Evangelical propaganda.

Likewise , each piece in the show will compete with the rest of the ensemble to draw the spectator’s attention – to demand priority. Distraction, a determinant element of the creative process and of the artist’s own life, is now shown to the public with the same alienating capacity with which it deviated, facilitated, or even prevented the achievement of the works. They then become the same distraction whose victims they were at some point, to “attack” the spectator, demanding his complicity and energy.

In turn, the painting surface becomes a memorandum, a journal in which I write down things I cannot forget when I am painting. I likewise include images from publications I have posted in Facebook, as well as notes having to do with my daily routine . And if that were not enough, the surface of the painting also becomes a palette, mixing on the already painted canvas the colors I will use for my next painting, in a gesture that perhaps recalls “Vomitaction” by Gunter Brus. Thus, the reuse or recycling of the work introduces a new concept into the ensemble, in which I return to the functionality of the work of art, the recirculation of information in the artistic product, and where I also introduce a doubt with respect to the purpose of the symbolic production, the famous “end that justifies the means.”

One could mention Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Parker Ito, and Guillermo Kuitca as antecedents to these works, the last-mentioned because he turned the surface of the canvas into a diary of his life; using it afterwards as tablecloth on his worktable, and marking a specific time of his daily life with each one of these fabrics.

Many concepts have been handled with chaos and arbitrariness in the apparent incoherence or disorder of this proposal, but most important is ultimately the wish to reveal my life in its full dimension by transmitting subtle sensations such as coldness, anxiety, doubt, or fever to the public. This tells directly of my idea of what art should be; of the concept that what is not seen is as important or more than the end result, echoing the old Oriental proverb: The important thing is not the end of the road, but the road itself.

Life is a constant theorization about itself. Sitting down to talk about distraction is also distraction, and therefore arguing about that phenomenon leads to the futile fact that we are constantly submitted to a simulacrum whose only purpose is to distract us from what we should focus on to live . The distraction of the masses, generated by the centers of power, begins by distraction of the individual, and it is that aspect that I wanted to show in this exhibition.

However, my ultimate objective is that the work becomes a distracting element, thus identifying art as promoter par excellence of distraction within society.

Without a practical and useful purpose for the human being, art has always been a symbolic commodity around which numberless people have consumed their lives without reaching a conclusion about its nature and course. And despite the many attempts to grant utilitarian meaning to the artistic product (one could cite artivism as one of the best examples ), its sterility has not yet been turned into something more than a pretext used by some to entertain, amuse, produce doubt, confound, and confront in the best of cases, but which never solves any concrete problem. Nor does it need to solve any.

Following this trend of thought, I can conclude that the investigation and study of art only makes a symbolic contribution, since the importance of a work such as ours is totally illusory, fictitious, and imputed.

In the same way that educational design is directed toward distraction, art is also distraction, and therefore the present text (required by one to explain/justify the other) is by no means to be excluded from this complex scheme. Sitting down to write a text like this implies distracting attention from pressing needs , dedicating time to investigate and theorize, alienate. However , if it is only conceptual support for the one who writes it as starting point for the present exhibition, it will be all the more worse for those who unnecessarily try to argue about it without realizing that theory is one of the many disguises used by distraction to trap people.