Iván Capote

[…] In his more recent personal exhibition at Galería Habana he presented in unison objects of accused three-dimensionality, drawings, projects; all and each one of them were installations of a cluster of ideas in the space. On this matter, one of the most remarkable artworks was No More Words (Lies), a glass filled with water inside which each one of the letters that compound the phrase “no more words” rests, cast in bronze. Intolerance is the label that seems to be outlined in the almost overflowing surface of this delicate container; on the other hand, discourse, speech and manipulation are in the bend of its depths, settled in the nether world of the glass. A letter, perhaps only one more sound, and the overflowing is imminent: fatal balance that shows stress, intransigence, anger. The textual condition of reality, the symbolic character that each one of the parts of social life has, and therefore its submission to the rules of an indoctrination sometimes cross-dressed as ideology, pragmatism or even religion; the subtly programmed nature of human existence; they are all possible causes of crisis for the conflict unlinked inside this artwork. It could be also the unveiling of all those structures of management and control that organize nowadays the logic of the globalized world and which are supposedly out of the human capacity of apprehension and representation, of the insidious applicable speeches and their traps and, eventually, of the justified practice of a new kind of nihilism, settled in an unstoppable capsize, a stinging that hurts the back with the coldness of a saline burn.

This artwork made by Capote works as a possibility of representation of what for some time was supposed to be non-representable: the world that exceeds the project capacity of our neurons spreads over the skin in a feeling of vastness that, paradoxically, reflects the human vulnerability to the immeasurable. The certainty that we are lambs guided by the word of others is expressed in a confusing cramp, futile electrification of the weak mass, of earth and blow.

In this artwork, Capote has made a sort of closed universe in which tolerance is related to the capacity of the vessel, the liquid means swallowing, assimilation and understanding; letters allude to the guidelines of a game in which culture controls, determines, limits, while the tension on the surface of the water alludes to skepticism and the vastness to self-consciousness. The interpellation of this scenario to several conflicts of everyday life is valid. Anyway, this is a possible metaphor of the immediate present, of the attitude that the civilization assumes before the risks of present times, of power and current status; of the fallible human belief in their absolute freedom; and even of the deficiency and impudence of a particular speech about the thought, the logic and the world that, in its unflattering and, paradoxically, revolutionary contractions, has intended to order human experience, and establish as reason […].¹

1. Luis Enrique Padrón, An Act of Pure Cognitive Lubricity, http://www.cubartecontemporaneo.com/review/act-pure-cognitive-lubricity/.