Reinaldo Cid

Treasurer is an installation made up of a photography and an object. On the wall, the two-dimensional work shows an old man in a horizontal position, who is replacing, with his head, one of the wheels of a safe that is empty and open and equally vulnerable as a result of time. Next to it, there is a sumptuous trunk with the worn away wheel that is missing in the image. The old man lying on the floor works as an allegory of the human and mortal nature. The safe, on its side, is a symbol not only of the material, but also of men’s desire for protecting their possessions. With the piece, Reinaldo makes possible, in a metaphorical plane, the communion of various antonymic binary concepts: spiritual and material, subject and object. Nevertheless, there is something that causes concern: the relationship between both binary pairs is based on dependency, on the subordination of the first one to the second. Through the paradox proposed in the photography, it becomes imminent to reflect on specific attitudes, ethical norms, and life philosophies that are sometimes adopted by the human being, all of which are very close. What we possess, possesses us, ties us, imprisons us; that that we own, on which we have power, annuls our freedom and existence. After all, what is a treasure? Isn’t it something valuable, carefully hidden and of the owner of which there is no clue? By means of this parable, the work obliquely establishes as many correlates related to our reality as diverse and wide the receptor’s imagination is.       

However, Treasurer not only proposes a questioning of the blurring the desire for power produces and of the loss of perspective of those who suffer from it. In both the subject and the object, the inevitable traces of time are manifested. The physical deterioration is equal in both of them. Hence, the work creates a tension in the absolute difference between what is considered to be mortal and ephemeral and what is considered to be eternal and everlasting, at the time this equivalence annuls the absolute opposition among the aforementioned antonymic concepts. In Treasurer, Reinaldo emphasizes on the destroying and devastating power of time, of progress. He seems to be saying through it: time destroys everything. The old man and the safe show the concrete evidences produced by the exhaustion of wandering during centuries of distance.   

With this installation, Reinaldo goes back to recurrent topics in his work; the conceptualizations on the notions of time and reality, understanding this last as constant development and change. Time and its traces in men and in men’s work have been a constant concern in a great part of his photography. Let us remember the pieces of series like 180° de Nada (180° of nothing), Volver en sí (Coming back), Out, and Feromonas (Pheromones). The procedure to translate this conceptual elaborations to photographic language continues to be a stage construction with a symbolic nature that is very well thought and in which there is nothing missing or over. It is easy to conclude, hence, that these visual constructions are preceded by Cid’s introspective meditations, which are not betting much for the acute and reflexive revision of the nation’s history the artist’s has made us get used to, but for a penetrating ontological scrutiny.  

–Ariadna Cabrera