For many people, Serones’s artistic proposal is just another possibility of the abstract language in the game of roles of contemporary Cuban art. Regarding this, they only make reference to the aesthetic-formal aspect, letting aside the fact that the universe recreated by these young artists is the result of a capricious fabled act of deconstructive character. Their artworks are far from abstraction in a strict sense, far from passive contemplation, far from decoration. In their actions we will notice a sort of reuse of this code in order to reach other zones of human understanding, more related to the organic side. Pure sensibility leads to the knowledge in the rough, spreading at the end in impressions of visceral kind an erotic sort of representation.
On the other hand, among metallic tones, violent textures, tears, and such great dramatic restraint, the world is indemnified in its dystopian appearance. It is the disconcerting range of a universe without terrestrial referents in which micro and macroscopic things fuse in deceitful armors of elastic outer layers, the propitious element of a new spatial sense. In the end, all and each of these habitats are quality constellations translated to the formal language, which wait for being taken out of center as experience.
Due to all these elements it is not possible to use the concept of abstraction in formal terms as a hold for Serones’s oeuvre. On the contrary, a new kind of naturalism in which perception serves as means for imagination and eludes the alibi of reason, describes more exactly their poetic universe. Now well, in this attitude lays another kind of synthesis more related to the cultural order and the conventional logic of the world we live in nowadays. Elusive at the end, their artistic proposal goes around the showy system of culture and its network of symbols; it encloses it and finally subdues it to its radical des-automation. It attacks the image’s iconic character and with this act it takes out of center its possible symbolic quality. Behind every artwork there is a disturbing sensation of emptiness, the universe of contents we are used to go to in order to clarify the meaning that every image must have is missing. Instead there is a bunch of sensations that in their connection make possible an act of order that tends to what is sensible and imaginary, inexact and unlikely.
But in the sensibility lays too a high level of iconicity before which another symbolic system emerges, less authoritarian but unbreakable as well. We directly associate the space they have mapped with inhospitable environments, with rarefied atmospheres, with uncertain and distant lands, and we annul their level of normality, adjudging them a complete incoherence with the world’s representation we consider valid. Therefore, we deny the value of a system of recognition because of its incompatibility with another with the same probabilities of veracity. Is it not clear already that everything in the world is the product of perception, and that even our image is the result of mentally generated processes? Why do we define as abstraction or simply surrealism a cosmogonist representation of this nature? Well, because it escapes from the possibilities of collective experimentation, and thus it is erroneous, that could be a reason. Actually, the existence on the canvas is not reason enough for its validation: it could be any other.
Let us make clear that it is not exactly the ulterior intention of this creative attempt to affirm the veracity or the existence of such unlikely environments before the image of reality we have assumed as valid. Anyway, its function is to declare to any sensible being the insufficiency of the strategies of representation used by man to map his everyday life, the asphyxia that torments that incunabula network of symbols that humanity has made circulate and defends as absolute truth in this times of so many fallen towers. Right in this level the possible ways of a new kind of naturalism are exposed; one naturalism that may be close, not to the sensible dimension of the world of objects surrounding man, but to the sensible dimension of the world of concepts that glorify him. Plato declares in The Republic that the existence we assume as real is no more than an imperfect projection of superior entities that gather in the world of ideas. And he also said that if life was already a projection, art was a coarse copy. Without being aware of it, for centuries we consequently assumed that such world of entities had a rational nature and existed out of us, in a place we would go to at some point of our existence. It would be worth wondering then if that idealized world in its own indescribable character does not lie, on the contrary, inside ourselves since the very moment we are born. Is it not Plato’s world of ideas just the right device of human perception in the end?
Serones are not trying to create an image of that space of knowledge; they are not even trying to emulate, parting from a representative mirage, with its power. On the contrary, it is the weakness of the construction that mediates in our relation with the world what tenses and thus demarcates the weight of culture in life and in human thinking.
Thus, it could be affirmed that this attempt is typical of all the European avant-garde, with Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Informalism as top points in its development and that therefore, it has nothing relevant to offer in our times. But before, it must be taken into account that Serones’s very particular poetry and the representation of the world they build do not take part of the utopian sign of those years, but of our time’s decadency. Serones have founded the basis of a post-apocalyptical tale where Plato’s myth of the cave acquires a virtual sense. The wear of representation announces the break of the order that supports the normality of the referent and the assimilation inside the language, of all its cracks.