José Manuel Fors

Objetos, 2007

Gelatin silver print, 110 x 180 cm.


  • The act of accumulating elements is vital to Fors: in his installations as well as in his photographs, he gathers and puts together many pieces to make one work.
  • The act of accumulating elements is vital to José Manuel Fors: in his installations as well as in his photographs, he gathers and puts together many pieces to make one work.
  • José Manuel Fors relies on a grid format to constructs his spectacular works, in which numerous photographs reinforce his themes.
  • Exceptionally rare, the work of José Manuel Fors marked a crucial stage in the development of a new aesthetic on the contemporary Cuban art scene.
  • As a leading exponent of both installational art and photographic experiments, Fors, a poet of visual arts, is one of the most important artists of Cuban contemporary plastic arts.
  • As a leading exponent of both installational art and photographic experiments, José Manuel Fors, a poet of visual arts, is one of the most important artists of Cuban contemporary plastic arts.
  • Some of the most effective photographs in the Fors’s work take full advantage of the formal possibilities available because of his treatment of a rectangle grid.
  • Exceptionally rare, the work of José Manuel Fors marked a crucial stage in the development of a new aesthetic in the contemporary visual and plastic arts of Cuba.
  • Contemporary artist José Manuel Fors’s work marked a crucial stage in the development of a new aesthetic on the visual plastic arts of Cuba in the late ’70s.
  • Objects, one Fors’s most important pieces, is a symmetrical composition made of several images of objects; its narrative is based on the story of each object.
  • Fors is a poet of the physical world, a collector of bits and pieces, scraps and memories, his work is a stunning form of visual biography.
  • A través del protagonismo de los objetos más comunes, una especie de arqueología para la recolección de las huellas del hombre y el paso del tiempo; Fors reconstruye sus obras, autenticas poesías visuales, reconstrucciones de la historia y la memoria del hombre.
  • José Manuel Fors, José Bedia, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Gustavo Pérez Monzón, Rogelio López Marín (Gory), Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, Flavio Garciandía, among other important protagonists of the so called generation of the ’80s who, both in Volume 1 as in earlier and later exhibits, brought new thematic interests, ethical reflections and creative procedures to the Cuban scene.
  • Fors’s work marked a crucial stage in the development of a new aesthetic on the visual plastic arts of Cuba in the late ’70s.
  • In the Cuban contemporary artist and photographer José Manuel Fors’s work, what is ordinary is also precious; a stunning form of visual biography.
  • The intuitive propensity towards the common place and object, as well as his eagerness to rescue and collect these object-witnesses, clearly placed Fors among the group of artists that since the late ’70s transferred the focal point of art in Cuba from the social context to the individual.
  • Exceptionally rare the work of José Manuel Fors marked a crucial stage in the development of a new aesthetic on the visual plastic arts of Cuba.
  • A través del protagonismo de los objetos más comunes, una especie de arqueología para la recolección de las huellas del hombre y el paso del tiempo; Fors reconstruye sus obras, autenticas poesías visuales, reconstrucciones de la historia y la memoria del hombre.
  • Fors is a poet of the physical world, a collector of bits and pieces, scraps and memories, his work is a stunning form of visual biography.
  • Tras el lente ocurren las auténticas obras de Fors, la disposición de un universo de formas cuidadosamente seleccionado, que incluye el azar, sus dotes de diseñador, una sintonía espacial con los materiales, y una sugerente habilidad para trocar toda textura en símbolo.
  • José Manuel Fors is a poet of the physical world, a collector of bits and pieces, scraps and memories, his work is a stunning form of visual biography.

A Story in Every Corner

Every object carries a story of life with it; transcendence not only lies in the human tale, artifacts go through an evolutionary process too, they also wear out, they are revitalized, they are perfected, they die… José Manuel Fors is a compulsive collector, a chronicler of objects, a tireless investigator. The most graceful space for him would be a curiosity office or an antique shop where every device, with its stains and sufferings, contains a tale, a mark of time.

Long years of work, starting in a date near the decade of the eighties of the last century, have served him to compile every story he has found at every turn and to give it a new meaning, or even better, to reconstruct its existence. And to make possible for these stories to chase immortality, he has chosen to take pictures of every object or to groups of them and make up a visual memory, so he highlights their individualities and at the same time they reaffirm their membership to a community of things. Thus, horseshoes, conches, dolls, pieces of cutlery, keys and doorknockers merge in an image, an archive saved for the future that keeps stories and lives that were imperceptible until then.

With no intentions of naming his artworks, and in order to avoid the break of the symbols involved in every one of them, Fors prefers to title his artworks according to their traditional conceptualization. Objetos (Objects), which was made in 2007, is perhaps one of his most eloquent creations in this respect. Nothing invades the metaphor suggested, none of the artifacts is more important than the others, all of them coexist in the same space, and they all have leading roles in the tale.

Accumulation becomes essential means for the artist, who considers it an allegory of the passing of time, of the buried memory. In addition to that, the technique he uses –gelatin silver–, in its different variants, gives the surface sepia and grayish tones, very in the mood of the spirit of the artwork. Due to his impeccable procedure and to the innovation in the strategies of his discourse, José Manuel Fors has being set up as one of the paradigmatic artists of Cuban contemporary art, who deserved the Visual Arts National Award in this year 2016.

Despite his successful foray in installation, his photographs have reached an unbeatable artistic quality, which has caused that he is considered forever an artist of the lens. In his objects, whether they are documented or in their original state, in the textures he recreates and in the sometimes imperceptible matter, there lies the richness of his oeuvre, a project beyond taxonomies or categorizations.

–Claudia Pérez