Agustín Bejarano

Time simulates having stopped and it weighs. The restlessness provokes an oppression in the chest as if one could not reach air to breathe. The door in from of me has its own flesh. One discovers its skins in the trenches left by the fractured painting, in those pieces about to fall off, about to jump on me. That door, which perhaps was once white, opens. A trace of breeze takes me to see The Rites of Silence […].

Once we in from of them, with that more recent and fresh part of the series of Agustín Bejarano we may recognize the importance he grants to time. It has been at the same time both body and spirit inside all his work, handled almost always with a certain anarchy, but valuable every time the artist has required to define multiple identities.

On this occasion time is a premise, a clause in the legitimacy of its rites, though its outlook now differs substantially from the sense the artist granted it in previous works. If with it Bejarano granted space to memory to recreate its dramaturgy (i.e., its history) and, after its appropriation it was possible to reach certain states of permanence, the new series turns to be an immediate now –or if you prefer it– a present that denounce in its instantaneousness the drama of human existence, consuming itself in its own immediacy […]. ¹

1. Caridad Blanco, “Prayer,” Los ritos del silencio, Agustín Bejarano (Catalogue, Havana: Servando Art Gallery, 8^th Havana Biennial, 2003), 8.