Next Friday, November 20th, at 6.00 pm, the exhibition Don’t Play with History will be opened at the Gallery Rubén Martínez Villena. There, the Cuban visual arts’ audience will have the chance to enjoy the most recent work by the young creator Hander Lara.
Lara’s artistic proposals are already known in the current panorama of visual arts as a result of their inclusion of texts and words that function as sense generators and producers. This time, the artist continues using text, but exploiting language’s graphic, plastic and semantic potentialities to the full. Belonging to the series of the same title, the works to be exhibited in the gallery establish a direct game with the codes with which graphic design operates. As a political propagandist, or advertising creator?, Hander Lara creates the slogan that provides the exhibition with a title, and he represents it in a number of canvas by employing diverse typographical styles and designs, all of them institutionalized and with high levels of iconicity, that established guidelines and became aesthetical paradigms in the fields of advertising, fashion, architecture, and visual arts in specific moments in history. The diverse graphic marks in which his phrase is expressed, as well as its form, design, color, and the background that serves as its basis, are allusive to diverse referential universes. Nowadays, the aforementioned visual elements have become archetypes that comprise the periods’ spirit and essence in a superficial and reductionist manner. It is on that phenomenon, perhaps, that Hander Lara calls our attention when he enunciates his committed sentence: Don’t Play with History. CCCP, 50, Pixels, Middle East, and Military are some of the titles we will find in this exhibition that, in general, proposes a critic on the omissions, simplifications, and coverings produced in history’s discourse from a perspective of the present.
Little time after realizing his reflections about the incongruences of a unique art historiography in his exhibition within the framework of the Biennial, Art in Theory, Hander Lara incisively expresses, from the solid and attractive aestheticism of the pieces, the danger not telling the truth, forgetting, and even omitting, implies for history.
–Ariadna Cabrera