Nosotros, los sobrevivientes,
¿a quiénes debemos la sobrevida?1
El otro (1959), Roberto Fernández Retamar
When Rancaño intercepts with his stroke the human being he disrupts all neat visual communication. In a sea of suggestions in which the symbolic and the gestural intermingle, his technical richness results in a visual poetics difficult to classify in preconceived movement or periodization. However, in the artist’s metaphysical universes, the evolution of the fundamental guidelines of the Cuban visual arts of the last decades are condensed with meticulousness and singular originality. The rescue of the trade inherent to the nineties in Cuban art, as well as the incorporation and development of the human body in the artistic photography of the same period, are two of the elements that sustain this affirmation.
Rancaño questions the purity of the mediums as protagonists of his speeches. Hence, the photographic matrix constitutes the genesis of his canvases, but drawing is the medium through which he carries out visual extensions of the lens. A multitude of contrasts of lights and shadows, textures and signs that act as (pre)text to delve with insight into problems of strictly human origin.
The excellent making that emanates from a perfectionist drawing, the work of black and white cultivated by the tradition, the incorporation of dissimilar symbolic elements –both objects and assumed postures– could generate distractions, but even so, Rancaño’s art scrutinizes sharply the interrelations of man with the world and with himself. The feminine body, leit motiv that characterizes a large part of his production, stands as epicenter of socio-ideological conjectures. That is why, beyond the beauty that comes from the representation and modeling of feminine Eros, lie surreptitiously discourses, more reflective than aesthetic, in any case, of excellent balance between the two.
1. We, the survivors, to whom do we owe the survival?